


Old Embers, New Flames

by SkirtWithAWeapon



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Endgame, Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2018-10-18 19:34:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10623684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkirtWithAWeapon/pseuds/SkirtWithAWeapon
Summary: Sequel toGunsmoke and Blades.Opal and MacCready made good on establishing their club for hired guns, The Mayors of the Wastes.  Life had moved on and work was steady.  Late one night, a shadow from MacCready's past cast itself into their lives, making demands coupled with threats that causes Opal to dig out her gear and hit the road with the rude and rough Kurt Bleishtift.





	1. Chapter 1

The common room in the main building of The Mayors of the Wastes complex was jovial, as it was most nights. A few packs of mercenaries were blowing off some steam, drinking, exchanging stories, egging each other on to bet against each other in future challenges. 

Opal swept her hair back and tied it into a ponytail, before picking up a rag and sopping up some spills left over from the group that had just vacated one of the tables. She was loading the used glassware into a tub of soapy water, when MacCready appeared from the back stairwell leading to the upper floor, and their living quarters. “Hey, beautiful,” he greeted her, gently placing his hand in the small of her back. He wore plain black pants, with a grey t-shirt under a brown sport jacket with the sleeves rolled up. His worn leather duster and cap had long since been retired, as were his days of wandering the wasteland as a freelance mercenary.

“Hey,” she smiled at him. “The kids all settled in, I gather?” Opal had similarly retired her Pip Boy, custom leather jumpsuits and the sharp, bladed gloves, which comprised the uniform she had relied on so heavily just three years prior. Simple jeans and a faded pink, silk blouse, were her attire for that day.

“For sure. Duncan was a bit of a mule, but Sage put him in his place as she usually does, these days.” He helped himself to a beer from below the bar and twisted off the cap. “He seems extremely concerned over the fact he doesn’t get to stay out here and be part of the _party_. We should just let him sit behind the bar some night and see he’s only missing a bunch of adults have boring conversations. I bet he’d be asleep within minutes.” MacCready took a swig of his beer and turned his attention to looking out into the room.

“I have a feeling that would backfire,” Opal giggled, lining up the glasses to dry. She wiped her hands on a worn dish towel. “He’s got a streak in him, not unlike his dad.”

“Heh. Now that he does.” MacCready took another swig of his beer and gestured out to the crowd. “They’re fired up. Who’s late?”

“Mayor Stemway. Though he’s still got…” Opal looked up to the clock on the wall that had been engineered out of mirelurk claws, “…five minutes.”

“Mayor Stemway’s gonna have a lot of drinks to buy, am I right?” MacCready bellowed into the room. The remaining Mayors cheered, stomping against the planked floor. He glanced over at Opal, and winked. She shook her head, though she was grinning.

“Has anyone looked to see if he’s on the road?” Opal called at one of the bouncers next to the entrance. Both of them exchanged a look, and finally one opened the door and stepped out. A moment later, he returned and shook his head, then shrugged. “Shit,” she began, looking over to the west wall, “it’ll break his streak.”

The west wall was nothing but a set of chalkboards, listing member’s names by rank, active contracts, available contracts for bidding, and of course, those that were expiring and the bet count. Mayor Stemway would have hit a solid dozen contracts completed without fail and on time. He was one of their earliest members and quite quickly had shown he deserved to be there.

The room started counting down the final thirty seconds. At “nine,” the door burst open, and in clattered the mangled body of Mayor Stemway. The room fell silent as they stared at him.

“Pay up…mother…fuckers…!” He croaked out of a bloody, grinning mouth, holding up the oozing heart of a rare, and deadly, purple mirelurk razorclaw. Stemway immediately proceeded to pass out onto the floor.

“Got a bleeder,” cried one of the other Mayors. The bouncers reached down to scoop him up and drag him off to the small medical shack set up within the grounds.

An awkward silence remained in the room. “Well, the man’s right: pay up! Do I need to call you out?” MacCready approached the board. “Looks like Perriweather, Stone, and Mercer had bet he wouldn’t make it in. Hop to it! My gorgeous wife will collect your caps now, please.”

Opal made a show of pulling out the lacquered wooden collection box and plunking it onto the bar. “Who’s first?”

The tone within the bar room was more subdued after that, as half the patrons had to pay up their bets, then left. The drinking slowed some, as well. Those who won bets took their caps, finished their drinks, and retired out to the lodgings. Mayor Stone and his crew remained until last call, and didn’t need to be sent out when the common room closed at midnight. The bouncers approached to receive their payment for the night, then bid Opal and MacCready goodnight.

Opal finished finalizing the cap tally to lock into their safe upstairs, sitting at the ruined desk in the office off the back of the bar. She swept the last few into the leather pouch just as MacCready entered, carrying a crate of empty beer bottles. He set the crate into the corner with a collection of others, then blocked Opal from leaving the office. “Pretty good night. Those bets were _huge_. Seems the odds were high that Stemway wasn’t going to be able to level the ‘lurks in that sewer on time.” His eyes were sparkling. “Have a drink with me.”

“How do I say no to this face?” Opal cooed, reaching up and squeezing MacCready’s mouth so that it puckered. He flicked her off, then led her back into the common room. MacCready swung her up onto the bar, and produced two more beers. He twisted the caps of both, then handed her one.

“Cheers,” he prompted.

“Cheers,” she echoed, tapping her bottle against his, before they both took a drink.

“You know what day it is, don’t you?” he asked, his head taking on a curious tilt.

_Oh, no. Is it his birthday? What did I forget?_ “It’s…”

MacCready barked out a laugh. “You can’t even guess? Opal. Come on.”

“ _Is_ it your birthday?” she tried, anyway.

“No!” He idly twirled his beer bottle in the air. “It’s the anniversary of when we found Duncan’s cure. Four years ago.”

Opal shuddered at the memory of cleaning ghoul brains off her legs. Was it really that long ago? Time was flying. “I guess it is. The day you tossed me in front of a turret.” 

MacCready laughed again. “Oh damn, I forgot about that!” 

“You ever think about that life we had, then? Scraping by, in danger constantly?” Opal sipped her beer before plunking it down next to her on the bar.

“Sometimes,” MacCready admitted with a shrug. “Hard not to. That life was all I had known, other than shortly after Duncan was born. You worried that’s a bad thing?” 

“No,” she replied softly. “I was just wondering.”

“You used to think about your pre-war life all the time.”

“I did. For the same reasons.” Opal shrugged, mimicking his gesture, and took another drink of her beer. “Happy anniversary.”

“Happy anniversary,” his turn to echo. He leaned forward and kissed her. She closed her eyes and kissed him back.

They were interrupted by a clamour at the door. It banged open, and in stepped a broad, tall man, carrying a duffle bag, a rifle, and several pistols strapped down his left leg. He wore ripped jeans, heavy black boots, and a bomber jacket that seemed both unseasonable and as though it had seen much better days. He was accompanied by a medium sized, longhair, black dog, resembling some kind of collie. “ROBERT! JAY! MACCREADY!” he roared. 

Both Opal and MacCready blinked at the man in the doorway. Opal glanced at her husband, who merely shook his head. She looked back at the man. “We’re closed for the night. You’ll have to camp outside and apply for membership in the morning.” She paused, then added, “the lodgings are for members, only.” 

“I ain’t here for membership to your stupid club,” he growled, then jabbed an accusatory finger at MacCready. “I’m here for _him_. To collect on a debt.”

“For _me?_ Oh, no, you have me mistaken for someone else. I’m Robert _Joseph_ MacCready. Robert Jay is my cousin.” 

_Classic._ Opal tried not to laugh in front of the intruder and turned her attention back to the obviously disgruntled man at the door.

The man was not dissuaded and strode further into the room, the dog following at his heels. “You don’t remember me, do you? Always were a cheeky little shit.” He spread his arms wide. “It’s me, Kurt Bleishtift.”

MacCready blinked. “Kurt…?” Suddenly, his eyes widened. “ _That_ Kurt Bleishtift?! It…it’s been years!”

“Almost ten years, actually. I’ve spent most of them trying to forget about you, and how you ditched me on that job. Really screwed me over on that one, Mac.”

Opal swung her legs around and slid off the front of the bar, then looked between the two men. Her gaze stopped on MacCready. “What’s he talking about?” 

Kurt ignored her and continued. “I was just wandering around, gathering my bearings here in the Commonwealth, having crawled my way out of that hellhole Capital Wasteland – good call on leaving _that_ dump behind, I will give you that – when I hear a certain former mercenary called MacCready had shacked up with some Vault dweller and started his own…” He paused and looked around. “What the fuck do you call this place? A hunter’s lodge, or something?”

“It’s a club for the best hunters and mercs to join, have a place to eat and rest, and compete in various, friendly challenges,” Opal replied in a low voice. Her eyes had narrowed and her face was flushed. She decided she wanted Kurt out of her home, and as soon as possible.

“Sweet racket,” he winked at MacCready, then leered lecherously at Opal. “And you, sweetheart, are _much_ hotter than advertised.”

That was it. Opal stepped towards Kurt, easily head and shoulders taller than she, and pointed a finger into his face. “You’re on extremely thin ice right now, Kurt. I already told you we’re closed for business and also, closed to the public,” she growled. “You think you’re the first dickwad to blow in here, demanding something of MacCready? Everyone who thinks he’s cheated them has made their way here, thinking that they can squeeze something out of him because they’re jealous he’s successful, now.” She stepped back, but her finger remained in his face. “So, you can do as you’re told and come back in the morning, or you can leave here with a broken jaw and then _still_ come back in the morning.”

Kurt waved down his dog, which had started growling in response to Opal’s threatening stance and tone. “Fine. What’s a few more hours, after it’s been a decade already.” He nodded once more to MacCready. “She’s a spitfire, eh? Bet that can be fun.”

Opal slugged him, then and there. Her fist made a satisfying crack as it made contact with his chin, and the resultant stinging in her hand and wrist was worth it. MacCready erupted into a fit of laughter. “I’m standing right here, for God’s sake,” she hissed at Kurt.

Kurt made a point of leaning over and spitting some blood onto the common room floor. “Yeah. Point taken.” He straightened, shifted his bag on his back, then nodded to both of them. “I will see you both _in the morning_." 

Opal saw Kurt and the dog out, then locked and barred the door. She returned to the bar and her unfinished beer. “What a pig. Do I even want to know _that_ story?”

“The guy hired me to accompany him, his girlfriend, and someone else to go retrieve some ‘big treasure’ in the DC ruins, way back when. It was one of my first contracts. I don’t remember what we were looking for, but as we kept on, it became clear that he’d fallen for some scam where someone sold him an ‘old world treasure map,’” MacCready made the hash quote gesture with his free hand, “but it was a picture to nowhere and there wasn’t going to be a treasure. At worst, some of those scams led you into a raider nest, where they ambushed ignorant treasure hunters, killed them, and robbed them.” He downed the rest of his beer and left the empty bottle on the counter. “When he wouldn’t be convinced to give up the job, I left. Simple as that.” 

“With the money he paid you?”

“Well, yeah. I’d been pulling my weight, risking my life. Bullets cost money, and I’d used enough of them by then. But when I got wise to what was happening, I told him I was done. He hadn’t paid me to be possibly be ambushed by some psychos running a racket.”   MacCready put his hands on Opal’s waist and pulled her close. “I don’t want to talk about him, right now. You need to bring your beer and come upstairs. I get so riled up, watching you slug dirtbags like that.” 

Opal smirked and sipped her beer. “What’s in it for me?”

“Oh, you’ll see.” MacCready hooked his finger into the waistband of her jeans and began to lead her off.

He pulled them into their modest bedroom and closed the door behind them as quietly as possible. The moonlight was particularly bright that night, shining directly into the room from the single window on the far side. MacCready amorously wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her deeply, gently pushing his tongue into her mouth. Opal shuddered deliciously. His breath had the distinct tang of beer and an undertone of tobacco. …or was it just his skin that smelled like cigarettes? She didn’t care. Smoke and MacCready were inseparable, for her, and she wouldn’t want it any other way. She happily tangled her free hand into the hair on the back of his head.

He flicked apart the button of her jeans and unzipped them for her as well. Opal broke their kiss as she giggled. “Looking for something?”

“Shush,” he replied sternly. “I’m not lost.” Mac placed both hands inside the elastic waistband of her panties and in a single swoop, pulled both them and her pants down to her ankles. He tapped her on the foot. “Out, now, out, out.” She did as instructed, while taking a swig of her beer. He rose and put his hands back on her hips and began to lead her, backwards, towards the bed. Opal shuffled awkwardly as he pulled.

MacCready seemed to know the perfect number of steps between the door and the bed. He shed his sport jacket, dropping it to the floor, sat himself down on the edge of bed, then laid back and playfully slapped her with both hands on her naked backside. “Up you get.”

Opal raised an eyebrow, then reached down with her free hand to unbutton his pants. He grabbed her wrist, his head slightly raised from the bed. 

“No, I meant, _up here_.” MacCready tugged on her wrist to indicate she were to come up onto the bed. Opal laughed.

“What are you doing?”

“You are somethin’ else,” he sighed. “Put your knees here, where my hands are.” MacCready reached up and put a hand beside each of his ears. 

“Now what?”

“ _Now_ …” He reached up to put his hands on her hips and pulled her down until she was sitting on his face.

“Ah, ooh, ah, okay,” she muttered, raising the beer bottle back to her lips. MacCready’s tongue made a slow trace all around inside her labia. She shivered. The dual sensation of the touch and the wetness was enough to make her start to tingle.

He continued making the slow circle, around and around, a few times more. Opal moaned and settled herself further, beginning to feel relaxed. “Mmm,” she hummed, as his tongue teased the inside of her pussy. She couldn’t distinguish between her own wetness and that supplied by MacCready’s tongue. “Ahhh, baby, that’s _good_.” 

MacCready responded with a moan of his own, muffled by her body. He moved his tongue out and up and began to flick her clit. Opal moaned again, beginning to rock her body over him, enjoying the pleasure even more. He started to alternate between flicking his tongue with sucking. Opal’s pulse had begun to rise dramatically, and she felt sweat sliding down the back of her neck. She tilted her head back, grinding as he sucked her, and let her mind wander to thoughts of him riding her, his cock pounding in and out of her pussy. She fantasized about his hands on her body, gripping her breasts, as he pushed himself inside her, over and over. 

“Yes!” she cried out instinctively. Her entire body felt hot and sweaty, pulsating with the pleasure and building climax welling deep within her. She played the image of him fucking her over, and over, the intensity of his sucking and flicking increasing with every sigh and moan erupting from her lips. The empty beer bottle fell out of her hand and onto the floor with a clatter. “It’s coming, don’t stop, I’m cumming!” Her back arched as she cried and screamed in her release, a succession of ‘ah’ sounds, over and over, the ecstasy gripping and releasing her body in a set of pulses. 

“Ugh!” she groaned in her satisfaction, pulling herself off his face to fall into a warm, mushy heap onto the bed next to him.

MacCready snuggled up to her and planted a wet, pussy-tasting kiss onto her lips. “I knew you’d like that. Just a little suggestion I got from –“

“Do _not_ finish that sentence,” Opal muttered. “I’m in a good place, right now.” She didn’t want the image of some smut-talking Mayor to break her glow.

“Great.” Some rustling was heard from beside her. Opal opened an eye to see MacCready shimmying out of his pants and discarding them with a flourish to the floor. “Sit up.”

Opal begrudgingly pushed herself up and sat back onto her ankles. “Like this?”

“Are you being deliberately difficult?” Mac reached over and lifted her by the armpits so that she was back onto her knees. He regarded her while he stroked his erection. The drip on the tip glinted in the moonlight. “Over there,” he directed, pointing to the wall behind the headboard. 

“Why?” She was definitely being deliberately difficult at that point.

MacCready stepped onto the floor, took a handful of her shirt, and pulled her to the head of the bed. His hand still gripping the pink satin, he deftly swung himself back onto the bed and straddled her from behind, pushing her to lean against the wall. Opal lifted her hands to brace herself against the wall. MacCready reached up and gently caressed her body, following her curves, sliding his fingers down her belly and in between her thighs. He pushed them farther apart, then, leaving one arm wrapped around her, used his other to grip his cock and slide its head back and forth between her legs. 

“You’re soaking wet, O. Why’s that? My girl turned on?” He tilted his cock toward her belly button and pushed it inside her with a sigh. As he exhaled, Opal, instead, caught her breath. MacCready reached forward to wrap his arm around her leg and rest his hand on her inner thigh. He started slow.

“Fuck yes,” she replied, closing her eyes, all her focus on the wet cock sliding in and out of her. “All I could think about was you fucking me.”

“When you came, just now?”

Opal sighed as MacCready tightened his hold on her. “Yes,” was all she could manage.

“Tell me about it.” MacCready had fully shifted into taking the lead, as usual, when his cock was involved. 

Opal leaned closer to the wall to brace herself better as MacCready began to push faster. “It was…ahh…it was like my whole body was on fire.“

“Amazing,” MacCready murmured, letting himself sigh as well. “Tell me…something else.” 

_Something else?_ She had a sudden idea. “He made me really mad.” 

MacCready hissed in his breath, paused briefly, then squeezed her thigh and resumed his rhythm. 

“He just…mm…stood there, talking about me, like I wasn’t in front of him.” Opal paused to gasp as MacCready had pushed her fully against the wall with his faster rhythm. She moaned a few times, feeling her crotch soak his cock over and over in a sweet response to his movements. She swallowed, then continued. “I punched him, and my arm stung, but my body was buzzing and it felt _really good_.” 

“Oh _fuck_ ,” he cursed. “Oh, fuck yes,” he repeated. He began to thrust faster and harder. Opal’s forehead occasionally bumped against the wall.

“He just made me so _mad_ –“

“Shh,” MacCready interrupted sharply. He moved his hand from her thigh to reach around and cover her mouth, instead. Opal opened her eyes in surprise, but attempted to say nothing more. She moaned again and again, sweat and fluids soaking her crotch and dripping down her thighs towards her knees. The sound of her own muffled noises was unexpectedly arousing for her. MacCready grunted and sighed with his movements, then suddenly exclaimed, and released his hand from her mouth, panting. 

Opal’s arms were trembling from the quick release of the muscle pressure she had forced on them and she lowered them to rest against the headboard of the bed. MacCready nestled his chin onto her shoulder and sighed contentedly, wrapping his arms around her waist. His skin was sweaty against her belly. 

“Never thought you’d use that on me as dirty talk,” he purred into her ear.

“Kind of wish I’d done it sooner,” she smirked.

 

\--

 

Opal entered the common room shortly after sunrise with her entourage of children. Duncan followed her behind the bar, while Sage toddled on her two-year-old legs and pulled herself onto a bench at a table nearby. Opal poured two cups of milk and handed them to Duncan. “What do you guys want to eat?”

 “Soup!” declared Sage. “Soup, soup, soup!”

“We can have soup for lunch, Sagey-Pie. I’d have to make some,” Opal answered. She stood on her tip toes and rummaged around the hanging cupboard, desperate for some coffee.

“No! I want soup! I want soup, mummy, I want soup!”

 “Yes, Sage. We’ll have soup for lunch, I said,” Opal sighed. It was barely 8 AM and she already felt tired of arguing with the headstrong child. She finally found the coffee tin and pulled it out. It felt extremely light. She peered in and saw enough grounds for one pot more. “Better ask Horace to scout some out for me, when he comes with the caravan, today,” she muttered to herself.

 “Can we have toast?” Duncan asked, having returned to her side with his milk after giving the other to his sister at the table. His hair colour wasn’t MacCready’s, but he had his father’s eyes, and frame.

 “Now that’s a great idea,” Opal answered. She pulled the bread out of the cupboard and began slicing it. Despite her cries for soup, Sage accepted the toasted bread with butter, after all. Opal was pouring her second cup of coffee when MacCready appeared, wearing a black sweater featuring some holes in the bottom, and dark jeans.

 “G’mornin’,” he mumbled through a yawn. He held out a mug and Opal topped it off with coffee. “Is Danica coming in, today?”

 “Should be,” Opal replied. “She’s usually on time. There she is, now.”

 The door opened to the common room and in stepped a dark skinned, young woman, wearing a faded Nuka World t-shirt and denim skirt with sneakers. “Hi, everyone. Am I late?”

 “Not at all,” Opal replied. “Almost too late for coffee, though.”

 “Danny!” both children cried. They jumped up from the table and ran to the girl, hugging her legs.

 Danica laughed and gently pried them off. “Just a sec, let me get in.”

 “We’ve had a request for soup, if you think you can throw some together,” Opal added as Danica rounded the bar and got herself settled.

 “I think I can manage that.”

 Opal had turned to MacCready, who had settled himself with the children, when their late night visitor banged through the common room door once again. “Is it morning enough for you?” he cooed as he strode across the floor and sat himself at the table across from MacCready.

 MacCready gestured. “Right there, with the kids? Really?”

 “Who are you?” Duncan asked, his mouth full of toast.

 “ _Doggy_!” squealed Sage. She flung herself off the bench and nearly dove at the dog. 

“Sage, careful!” Opal jumped. Kurt raised his hand and waved her off.

“Don’t panic, _mom_ , Joe Boy loves kids. Don’tcha, boy? You like the little ones. Especially when they’re that cute.”

Opal’s stomach sank. She didn’t like how this was playing out, already. This man could be a major threat to their family, and he was making a point of being friendly with the children. She glanced over to MacCready in an attempt to read his feelings on it, but he was watching Sage with the dog and didn’t appear to be on edge. She took a slow breath, then approached the table, herself. She sat down, placing herself between both children. Sage delightedly continued to pet the dog, who did seem to be enjoying the attention. “That’s good, Sagey. Be gentle, just like that.”

“So, Kurt, you managed to track me down after all these years. What do you want?” MacCready pulled out his old mercenary demeanour, crossing his arms. Opal’s heart did a little flutter. _You’ve still got it, cowboy._

“Well, as much as I’m sure your ego would want me to tell you I scrimped, and scratched, and struggled, and seethed for ten years after you ditched out on me and that job, truth is that I cut your loss and moved on to other things. I’ve actually been independently successful for many of those years.” Kurt leaned forward and perched his elbows on the table. “A little while back, I felt like I just needed a change. I’d never been to the Commonwealth, so I wandered my way up here, just to check things out. It just so happened that I heard some of your Mayors, here – that’s what they’re called, right? -- gabbin’ about you and yer wife and this club, some night.”

“Great story, real touching. You still haven’t answered my question. You want me to pay back that hundred caps from forever ago, or what?”

Kurt ignored the question. “It then comes up that you were hitched to a genuine Vault dweller, with the Pip Boy computer thing and all that.” He jerked his attention to Opal. “Did you have one of those blue suits, too? Always wanted to try one of those on…”

“ _And?_ ” The irritation in MacCready’s voice was felt as well as heard.

“So, a while back before _that_ , I got my hands on some old documents, pre-war style, about different vaults and describing experimental weapons and serums, all locked away. There’s one vault in particular, though, where the door still works properly, but only opens if you have a Pip Boy. That Vault is right here, in this exact Commonwealth.” Kurt leaned back and stretched his arms up above and behind his head. “So, no, I don’t want your damn caps back. I want your wife to come with me to this Vault, open the door, and let me have a go at this treasure.”

“Mac and I,” Opal began gently, “we quit the merc business, ourselves. I’m not for hire, not anymore.”

Kurt grinned. “I’m not hiring you, I’m _borrowing_ you. Because he owes me.” He swung his gaze back to MacCready. “Or do you not care much about debts, like you used to?”

“I care,” MacCready growled. “Where you’re wrong is that I don’t actually owe you anything. You hired me for a job, but then it turned out to be a scam. There wasn’t a job. It was a set up. I told you that, and I told you I wasn’t going to keep following you into a trap. I don’t owe you for _you_ being stupid.”

“Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,” Sage sang.

“Duncan, take your sister to go play outside, please,” Opal said. “Sage, go outside with Duncan. Say ‘bye bye’ to the doggy for now.”

“Bye bye, doggy!” the little girl chirped, patting the dog on each word. She took Duncan’s offered hand and allowed herself to be led outside.

“You’ll have to pack your own bedroll, and maybe your own tent, depending on how you feel about platonic sleeping arrangements,” Kurt went on, again ignoring MacCready’s response. “Whatever weapons and ammo you need, that’s on you, too. I’m not gonna outfit you or anything like that.”

“I didn’t say yes – “ Opal interjected.

“—I’ll just pay you that hundred caps, and you can get out of here,” MacCready finished.

Kurt slammed both palms against the table, causing all three other adults in the room to jump. “I don’t want your goddamn _caps_ , MacCready! I don’t want to buy the Pip Boy, I don’t want to just borrow it, I want you to have to watch someone _you_ care about leave you with someone you would consider stabbing in the back, if you could!” He straightened, ran both hands through his hair, then folded his hands back onto the table. “Maybe, to you, it was a clean break. You walked off the job – with my girlfriend, incidentally, whom you turfed in Megaton maybe a week later – leaving me and Anderson on our own in the middle of the mutant infested DC ruins. Anderson caught the business end of a minigun, thanks for asking. Suddenly I had lost my best friend, my girlfriend I was gonna ask to marry me after the job, my hired gun, _and_ there was the whole humiliation of having fallen for a scam.”

“…oh, right. Samantha,” MacCready muttered, his voice taking a dreamy edge to it. “I forgot.”

Opal wasn’t sure if Mac was trying to be a brat, in that moment, but he had to have known it was going to set Kurt off. She kept her mouth shut and elected not to say a word.

“Of course you did, you snake. Stole her, slept with her, then dumped her, because you were more interested in screwing around with me than taking care of her.” Kurt clenched his hands together tight enough that his knuckles turned white. “You sauntered off, but me, I struggled to recover for _years_. When I found Samantha some time later, she had already moved in with someone, with a baby. She wanted nothing to do with me, convinced I was a complete fool, thanks to you.”

Opal’s head snapped around to glare at MacCready at the word “baby.” MacCready’s eyes widened and he seemed to read her accusation out of her expression. He raised his hands defensively.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! _I_ didn’t get her pregnant, O. Don’t look at me like that! She and I only really did it that one time, and I. Ah heh.” He stopped talking and his face flushed bright red. “Look, it just…it didn’t, uh, end like that. I swear.”

Her brow narrowed. She opened her mouth to say something else, when Kurt slammed a single hand against the table.

“Would you shut up? Jesus! Quit making this about you!” Kurt bellowed.

MacCready shrugged and gestured again. “ _You’re_ making it about me. This whole thing is about me and how you think I owe you.”

That seemed to cause Kurt to pause. He closed his mouth and was silent for a moment. “Okay, I see your point _there_. But truth is…I didn’t come to discuss this. I came to take what I want, just like you did from me, to balance the scale once and for all. Besides, a hundred caps ten years ago, plus interest, plus the fact you bailed on me…it’d be a solid ten g’s you’d owe me.”

“Fuck off,” MacCready scowled.

“Mac!” Opal chided, though hearing him swear like that gave her an odd little thrill.

“This is how it’s gonna be. Your little lady here pops on that Pip Boy of hers, grabs whatever she needs, and she and I go check out that Vault and grab its treasure. Or, you continue to refuse, and things just get a little more…ugly.” Kurt had resumed an all-too-casual tone of voice. 

“Are you threatening my family?” MacCready replied darkly.

“If it wasn’t for you, I would have had a family, myself. I spent years trying to forget about that girl. Meanwhile, this is, what, wife number two?”

Opal tensed. She knew for a fact she had underestimated Kurt. He had done his research, and was using it against them.

“I don’t see how that is any of your business, really. It’s not my fault you couldn’t find another girlfriend. You don’t get to use those problems against me, against my family, no matter what.” MacCready made to stand.

“Stop,” she said, reaching her arm across the table to rest on MacCready’s arm. “I’ll…I’ll do it. I’ll just do it.”

MacCready scoffed. “Opal, no, we don’t have to give in to this –“

“Ah, I can definitely see who wears the pants –“ Kurt began.

“Don’t be gross,” Opal interrupted him. She turned back to MacCready. “Trust me on this. We’ll talk about it later. As for you,” she began, standing up and glaring Kurt in the face, “we don’t leave until tomorrow. I need to gather my things, make arrangements here, and say a proper goodbye to my kids.”

“I…well, all right,” Kurt replied. “Tomorrow morning, then.”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Opal sneered before she could catch her tone. She wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to suit up and hit the road, defending herself for her life any given moment, having to sleep on the ground, live off cold foods more often than anything…She caught MacCready’s gaze and saw he seemed to be going through the same feelings. Three years was long enough to have felt comfortable, become settled, and leaving that wasn’t something either of them had planned on, or hoped for. 

Kurt exited the common room without another word, his dog Joe Boy right behind him.

MacCready swallowed. “I can’t believe you just gave in like that, O. I don’t owe him anything, and you owe him even less.” 

“I know, Mac. I agree completely. It all sounds stupid. Who could have exclusive knowledge of some experimental Vault ‘treasure’, somehow still locked up and just waiting to be taken?” Opal shook her head. She picked up her coffee mug and swirled the dregs, long cold. “It’s that he threatened the kids, Mac. Sage would follow him anywhere because of the damn dog he’s got, and Duncan, well, who knows. I…I couldn’t imagine those sorts of consequences.”

“So, you’ll go out, maybe to die, just so some loser from the Capital Wasteland can find another dead end?”

“I can handle myself, Mac, you know that. It’s been a while, but I’ve been practicing my knife throwing since the whole Nuka World thing, and I learned a lot from you.” Opal stepped around the table, reached over, and rubbed his arm. “It’s just a Vault. How bad could it be? Besides, he just wants me to open the door. There’s no promise I even have to go in with him.” She winked. “It’s not like I’m about to walk blind into a steaming cesspool of radiation and deathclaws – and, I’ll remind you, I did come out in two days, not three.”

“Goddamn,” he muttered, unable to keep from smiling. He wound his arms around her and hugged her tight. “I could just kill him, you know. That solves the whole problem altogether.”

“Mac, _no_. We don’t want to end up starting rumours that you murder people looking to get something out of you.” She sighed, nestling her head against his chest. His sweater smelled old, and faintly of his body’s scent, and tobacco. Gone were the days he smelled like gun oil and sweat. “This is nothing. Plus, if his story is true, he’s been through a lot of shit and a lot of it seemed to start from something you did.”

“Problem is, who’s to say you pulling this favour will be enough?”

“It’ll have to be. If he refuses, _that’s_ when we murder him.”

MacCready hugged her tighter. “That’s my girl, all right.” He kissed her head, then released her. “Well, Danica, I hope you’re good with serving bar full time, as of tomorrow.”

“Works for me,” Danica replied, setting up glasses and getting the bar ready to open for the day.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've read this far...thank you! Chapter instalments of mine don't tend to go much more than 4k words and chapter 1 kind of ran off on me.
> 
> I'm always open to any and all feedback, if you would like to share some :) thanks!!

It was at least a couple hours before dawn. Opal slipped out of bed and threw on her wrinkled, discarded clothes from the day before. She had been tossing around in her sleep and just needed to get some air. Her heart ached as she stood over MacCready, sprawled out on his belly, the moonlight highlighting his sleeping face and the rebellious strands of hair draped over his temple. Both of them seemed to have expressed some kind of desperation in their bedroom activities the night before, as though they each felt like it could be their last night together, forever, but neither had vocalised the feeling as such. Instead, each kiss lingered just a little longer, every touch, a little deeper.

_I love you, you hooligan. More than I ever thought. Maybe, more than I should._ She brushed the hair out of his face as gently as possible so as not to disturb him. He sniffed, still asleep, but otherwise didn’t move.

The early morning breeze carried a whiff of extinguished campfires and damp earth. Opal looked up to the sky and saw a few clouds cast over an impossibly starry night. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and set out. She quietly picked her way through the complex, nodded at the guard at the gate, then stepped off the road and into the grass and trees beyond. She followed a foot path that wound down an embankment and towards the pond, below.

Opal perched herself on a rock, leaning against a tree, and looked at the still water, marvelling at the pristine reflection of the starry sky above. She smirked, as the sudden memory popped into her mind of the last time she couldn’t sleep, and looked at the reflection of stars on water…and how _that_ all ended…

She sighed. “Not this time,” she murmured out loud to herself. For emphasis, she tossed a pebble across the surface of the water. It skipped once before plopping into the pool, ripples breaking up the reflection, flicking glints of moonlight in all directions. Opal had spent the better part of the previous day trying to imagine all the ways she could end up getting out of the job and back to the family as quickly as possible, but in the end she could only conclude that getting the job finished was the only way. Random murders weren’t uncommon yet still within the Commonwealth, but information spread faster and more accurately than she ever imagined in a world without television, and people would find out that Kurt Bleishtift had not only paid them a visit, but hauled her out on a job.

She couldn’t just kill him, leave his body to be found later, and have it not hurt the reputation she and MacCready had worked so hard to build for the last three years. _We don’t murder our debtors. We don’t want to set that precedent._

_Ultimately, we don’t even really know he truly is working alone. Maybe he wants the treasure to pay off someone else he owes. Wouldn’t be the first time. We kill him, whoever he owed then hunts us down, too._

_No. I just have to do the job. Stay alive, come home, call it even._ She frowned. She’d never been away from the kids, not like this, ever. It wasn’t going to be easy.

Opal exhaled and threw another rock into the pond, before she stood, and went back to bed.

There was a pounding on the common room door soon after dawn. Opal was tending to the kids’ breakfast and MacCready went to answer it. Kurt sauntered in and spread his hands, looking at Opal.

“Why aren’t you ready?” he asked her, exasperated.

“Really?” MacCready repeated, as he had asked the day before. “Right here? With the kids?” He accentuated each of the words, incredulously.

“What, do we have a different idea of ‘morning,’ or something?” Kurt rambled off, keeping his attention directed at Opal.

_He’s gotta know he’s making a good case for me to slit his neck. He must._ Opal gave him a closed-mouth smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m already packed, I just need another twenty minutes.”

“Where you going, mummy?” Sage asked, kicking her feet happily while she drew lines in the jam on her toast with her finger.

“I just have to help Kurt with a job. Kind of like a little trip. Remember, we talked about it yesterday,” Opal replied, setting buttered toast in front of Duncan.

“You gonna be back later?” the six year old asked before cramming bread into his mouth.

“Ah, no. Not quite that soon. It’s, you know, like a job the Mayors do. Could be a couple weeks.” Her heart was breaking but she tried not to show it. She glanced up at MacCready, hoping her expression indicated she needed backup.

“Oh. Okay!” Duncan chirped.

“Bye, mummy, bye!” Sage added.

_Of course._ Opal’s heart broke just a little bit. She knew the children weren’t trying to make her feel pushed out, but that didn’t make her feel much better about leaving.

“There, all done. Let’s get going,” Kurt harped from the doorway.

“Well, think of it this way, the sooner you head out, the sooner you get back,” MacCready said softly. “I’ve got this. Go get your things, babe.”

Opal nodded silently, then went upstairs for her supplies. MacCready had laid out her old, custom leather jumpsuit, across the bed. She put her hands on her hips and stared it down. _I don’t even know if it’ll still fit._ She stripped out of her jeans and sweatshirt and began pulling the soft, seasoned leather over her feet and gathered it at her ankles. She regarded her scarred leg for a moment, before pulling the pantlegs up and over her knees and thighs. As far as she could tell, the muscles and tissues had managed to repair themselves, though she was unable to put weight on her leg for two solid months in recovery. The skin was scarred, and puckered in weird places, never regaining the smooth curve it once had; MacCready never seemed to mind, and the important part was that she regained the use of her leg.

Still, she was done with skirts for the rest of her life.

She finished pulling the leather over her limbs, pulled the zipper up, then turned to view herself in the mirror. _Just like a glove._ Opal flexed and stretched, and felt the leather hold fast to her movements and curves. _Well, guess we better go, old friend._ She picked up her bag and was halfway to the stairs when she turned on her heel and went back into the bedroom. She opened the closet door, dug through the shoes laying on the floor, and pulled out a ripped cardboard box. She flipped off the lid, then tenderly pulled out her Pip Boy.

Opal had a strong sense of déjà vu as she clicked the personal computer back onto her wrist, and booted it up. It wasn’t nearly as grimy as the first day she put it on, though a few of the LEDs had burned out Still, the unmistakable cartoon grin of Vault Boy appeared and gave her a thumbs up. When she returned to the common room, the children were nowhere to be seen. Danica was tending to setting up the bar, and MacCready stood by the door.

“Thought you’d rather have a quiet minute,” he breathed, pulling her into his arms.

“Mm. Thank you.” She pulled back sooner than she wanted to, but knew in her heart it was time to go, and didn’t want to delay her return even that much longer. “I need to head out.”

“I know, babe, I know. Time to go kick some ass.” MacCready kissed her lips, then kissed her forehead, before pulling the door open and holding it for her. Opal gave a slight wave to Danica, and stepped into the morning sun.

“Mom, you look _cool_ ,” Duncan complimented, as she emerged. “Did you look like that all the time? Like when you and dad were mercenaries, before?”

“She sure did. Exactly like a comic book hero, and she was just as deadly,” grinned MacCready.

Opal wasn’t sure what to do with the sudden flattery. She blushed. “Well, thank you, boys.” She looked around. “Where’s Sage? I’d like to kiss her goodbye, too.”

“Playin’ with the dog,” Duncan replied. “I love you, mom!” He flung his arms around her waist and squeezed, tight.

Opal melted. “I love you too, kiddo. Help your dad with Sage, okay? I’m counting on you to be good.”

“I will.” He let go and took off running, back to stacking some toy cars.

Kurt was standing by the main gate, puffing on a cigarette, while Sage rubbed Joe Boy’s belly. The dog was sprawled out on its back, seemingly in nirvana, as Sage babbled and cooed. “Ready _now_?” Kurt tossed his cigarette to the ground.

“I am.” Opal looked down at Sage, and smiled. “I have to go, sweetheart. Can I have a hug?”

“No. I playing with doggy,” the toddler replied, not even looking up at her mother.

“Sage,” MacCready coaxed, “mummy’s leaving for a little while. She’d like to give you a hug and kiss goodbye.”

“No! Mummy go. I playing with doggy,” Sage repeated.

“Doggy’s coming with me, munchkin.” Kurt clicked with his tongue. The dog rolled over immediately and went to his owner’s heels.

“ _NOOOO!”_ Sage shrieked like she was being scalded. She flopped face-first into the dirt, sobbing and raving. “I! WANT! _DOGGY_!! WAAAAAAHHHH!”

Opal’s heart broke just a little bit more at the sight of her child choosing to tantrum, rather than bid her a sweet goodbye. MacCready reached over and squeezed Opal’s arm.

“It’s okay. Just tell her goodbye, anyways. She’ll be fine.”

Opal sighed. She leaned down and rubbed Sage’s back. “I gotta go, honey. I love you. Bye, Sage.”

Sage swiped her mother’s hand away, continuing her scene. MacCready gave Opal a comforting look and gestured for her to go. Opal’s shoulders fell. She offered MacCready a wave, then turned and exit the gate. Sage’s screaming could be heard quite a ways down the road, as Opal and Kurt walked along.

“Bet it’s nice to get away from _that_ for a little while, eh?” Kurt chuckled, idly picking some dog hair off his sleeve.

Opal grabbed the same sleeve and yanked him towards her. She grabbed his collar with her other hand and glared into his face. “Let me make one thing very, very clear, Kurt Bleishtift: you are not to ever, _ever_ , suggest you know a single fucking thing about me. Do you understand?”

Kurt grinned, a devilish expression. He forcefully pulled her hand off his collar, then dropped it. “Okay, Sparky, whatever you say. But you’re gonna get awful tired real quick if you keep jumpin’ down my throat like that, because I’m nothin’ but myself, right?”

Opal wasn’t sure that statement made sense, but she imagined she got the gist of it. “We’re not friends.”

“Damn right we aren’t. But can we at least pledge to not murder the other while we’re on the job?”

It took her a second to figure out what he was saying. Either he truly was not a well-spoken individual, or he was playing it up for his own entertainment. “Sure. I can promise.” She held her hand out to shake.

Kurt looked at it, before taking her hand in his. He wasn’t much larger than average, but Opal, being slighter than average, felt like her hand disappeared into his. He pumped once, firmly, then released her. “Good. Now that that’s settled, can we get moving in earnest, here? Time is money.”

_That, it is._

They walked on for a number of hours. Kurt had an annoying, obnoxious habit of whistling while he walked. The dog trot between them, seemingly happy to just be on the road. Opal found herself stepping to the side now and then, thinking she were going to step on the dog if she wasn’t paying attention. They began to ascend a steep hill.

“Don’t like dogs, Sparky?” Kurt drawled.

_I wish he’d drop that tone and just talk normal._ “No, not really. My husband and I had one, before, but – ah, forget it,” she caught herself.

“Before what?”

“Never mind, okay? We’re not friends, remember?”

“Geesh. For a spitfire, you can be awful cold.” Kurt stooped to pick up a twig and toss it up the road in front of them. Joe Boy took off like a shot to retrieve it. “Look, would it help if I told you I’m not out to screw you or MacCready over? I honestly had forgotten about that runt until I got to the Commonwealth, maybe a month or so ago. Hearin’ his name, and that it was the same damn guy from years ago, just triggered a bunch of stuff I thought I had left behind.”

“Heartbreaking,” Opal replied, devoid of any emotion.

Kurt rolled his eyes. Joe Boy had returned with the stick, riled up, tail wagging. Kurt took the stick and tossed it again. “We’ve got a long ways to go, so either we can find a way to tolerate each other, or it’s gonna make for a really, really long walk.”

“What do you care? Besides, _you_ threatened my family. That’s not exactly worthy of more than muted indifference.”

Kurt tossed the stick for Joe Boy a third time. The dog predictably, and excitably, took off as before. “All right, maybe gettin’ that aggressive was a bit far, but I didn’t think Mac, or you, were really takin’ me seriously back there. I had to…step it up some.”

“You gotta understand,” Opal began firmly, “ever since we opened the place, people who think that Mac owed them in some way have been in and out of our doors more times than I can count. Some of them paid the fees, joined up, and conveniently ‘forgot’ their beef with him. Others had fabricated stories of pure bullshit, just to try and get a piece.” She shrugged. “If we took every one of them seriously, we’d be broke.” She paused in her speech and kicked a rock across the ruined pavement.

“…all right,” Kurt repeated. “You make some reasonable points.” The dog returned once more but started trotting between the people, the stick in its mouth, appearing satisfied.

After a few moments of silence, Opal sighed. “Sorry I dismissed you so quickly. It just seems that no one spends a lot of time living in the wasteland before they have to endure some tragedy. Everyone’s got a sad story, you know?” She kicked another pebble, but it arced and landed in some soft dirt. “It doesn’t mean _your_ situation wasn’t rough, or anything, just…you get used to it, in a way.”

“Hm. Well, thanks, I guess. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected too much empathy from a former Vault dweller. Some of those vaults, you know, the ones where everyone wasn’t murdered in some terrible way, seemed like a real sweet deal.”

Opal felt like the wind was knocked out of her. Memories of waking up to her murdered husband, rows and rows of cryo pods housing dead bodies, the darkness, hissing, dripping, and the roaches, all crashed through her mind all at once. _I guess, for what it’s worth, Vault Tec didn’t intend on killing us. The Institute did that for them._

“Sparky? You there, Sparky? You got kind of pale there, for a moment.”

“I’m fine,” she lied, swallowing a lump in her throat. They crested the top of the hill. Kurt skid to a stop and flung his arm out to halt Opal as well.

“Oh shit,” he hissed. He pulled Opal off the road, slid down the steep and sandy hill face and into the ditch. Joe Boy took off in the opposite direction, running into the trees.

Opal rubbed her scraped palms off onto her lap and scowled. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Shush, shut up! There’s a Brotherhood patrol. Just gotta let them go by, all right?” Kurt whispered.

“Why? What did you do?”

“Not now!”

The hiss-and-clank rhythm of marching power armour began to approach their position from up the road. Opal could make out three unique voices. It was a small patrol, but a pain in the ass to have to deal with nonetheless. She barely dared to breathe as they passed overhead and clomped down the road. Opal remained quiet, straining her ears to listen for their receding footsteps, when Kurt knocked her on the arm and motioned for them to move. He hoisted himself out of the ditch and back onto the road in a single, fluid movement. She fought the urge to feel impressed with his athleticism, instead focusing on finding hand holds to climb out after him. Her height left her at a disadvantage, and she wasn’t able to reach the edge of the pavement even when on her tip toes.

Opal dug her hands into the dirt and lifted her leg to crawl up the incline. The next time she reached up her hand, Kurt’s own met hers and gripped her tightly. “Alley-oop, Sparky!” He lifted her up to the edge of the pavement. Opal was able to get her knee up onto the edge and stand.

“…thanks,” she muttered.

“Yup,” Kurt replied. He whistled towards the trees on the other side of the road. Joe Boy bound out from the shadows and returned to their sides.

“What’s your history with the Brotherhood?” she asked as they began walking down the road once more.

Kurt shrugged. “If you can believe it, I had joined up with them for a while. I was broke, starving, desperate, and I knew my way around a gun. Toughed it out with them for two years, trying hard to make my way up the ranks. Turns out, they favour their own for promotions, more than anything. So, I quit.”

“The Brotherhood doesn’t exactly just let people quit, though, do they?”

“Nope. Especially those who clean out whole ammunition lockers in the middle of the night before taking off, either.”

Opal rolled her eyes. “Sounds about right. But if you were part of the Capital Wasteland divisions, anyone hanging around here is unlikely to recognize you.”

“Probably. Why take that chance?” Kurt resumed tossing a stick for Joe Boy to fetch.

They conversed little for the rest of the day. Opal tried to focus on the job, and getting her headspace back into wasteland survival mode, but no matter what she couldn’t distract herself fully from thinking about her family. Her children. MacCready sent for Duncan shortly after they had found the old truck stop they chose to refurbish into their compound for the Mayors. The child arrived, looking healthy, his skin slightly scarred from where the blue boils had been on his body. He didn’t recognize his father, and Opal will never forget how heartbroken and devastated MacCready had appeared in reaction.

Duncan seemed to draw a natural conclusion all on his own, and had only ever referred to her as “mom.” She and MacCready decided in time they would tell him the truth, if only to honour Lucy’s memory. Duncan had no reason to believe his birth mother had died, not being old enough to remember her or her tragic death. Opal had adopted him fully. She wondered now and then if she was just acting on her own emotional trauma with the loss of Shaun and never having had the chance to raise him, perhaps overcompensating with Duncan. Regardless, they had established a relationship, and she missed him.

Kurt and Opal drew up to a ruined and empty farm house in the early evening. The sky had become overcast during the course of the afternoon, making it more difficult to tell how much daylight remained. Opal braced herself for an onslaught of mole rats, or scorpions, or even feral ghouls, but they got off lucky with a nest of radroaches. Joe Boy hopped and pounced, seemingly delighted in the exercise of squashing the bugs and making their heads pop off. Opal swerved out of the way just before being splattered with the guts of a glowing one.

“I’m going to go check out upstairs.” She left Kurt and Joe Boy to sweep up the roach carcasses and began to climb the stairs. Opal noticed the roof had fallen in and was halfway to the second floor landing when her foot went straight through the rotted board of the stair. Before she could compensate her balance, she fell forward completely, the stairs disintegrating under her weight and causing her to tumble back into the sitting room with a deluge of rotten wood. She choked on the debris and crawled out of the mess.

“How’d it go upstairs?” Kurt asked.

The collapse of the stairs seemed to shake up any and all dust that had settled in the house for the last two hundred years, making it unviable as a shelter for the night. It also had begun to rain. They acted as quickly as they could to pitch Kurt’s tent and crawled inside before they all got soaking wet. Joe Boy stepped into the tent and immediately shook out his fur, spraying Kurt and Opal both with water.

Kurt cut open an ancient can of soup and scooped out the contents into his mouth with a spoon he pulled from one of his pockets. Opal chewed on some jerky, wishing she had a beer. They ate quietly for several minutes. The sun had set, but the rain continued, causing a soothing pattering against the tent canvas and the air to cool significantly.

Opal stretched, then pulled off her boots and unrolled her sleeping bag. She couldn’t remember the last time she settled into bed before 8 PM, since she helped close the bar in the common room nearly every night once she and MacCready had opened the place. She wasn’t about to complain. “Well, goodnight,” she said to Kurt, before pulling the sleeping bag up and over her body.

“Night,” Kurt replied, sounding startled. 

She was asleep sooner than she thought. The first day of hard travelling in years seemed to catch up to her right away.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still actively working on this story! I know where it's going, it's the process of getting it there, right? I prefer to post updates a few chapters behind in terms of where I'm at in the process and had hit a creative drought for a bit, and didn't want to update myself into a corner.
> 
> Thanks for reading :D

They were back on the road shortly after dawn. Opal was beginning to see a pattern with Kurt, or at least, she drew the conclusion that he liked to rise early. She dragged her feet along in the low light of the pink and purple sky. _My kingdom for a coffee_. She stretched her arms up and tilted her head from side to side in an attempt to straighten out the kinks that had developed from sleeping on the ground for the first time in years. Never in her pre-war life would she have imagined that sleeping regularly on ruined mattresses in a house that had survived nuclear fallout would be considered a soft luxury, but there she was.

She yawned again, tailing Kurt down the road. The man seemed to have some natural energy he drew from the atmosphere. She felt a tiny pang of jealousy. The world was humid, and the roadway still damp from the rainfall the night before. The day seemed to be dawning to a clear sky, the rains having moved on or simply petered out. Joe Boy seemed to enjoy bounding through the mud and puddles. Between them, they seemed to have covered a decent amount of ground the day before, with only haven taken very brief stops to answer the call of nature. “Well, Kurt, since I’m far enough away from home, now, are you going to tell me where we’re headed? Which of the many magnificent Vaults is our destination?”

Kurt gave her a sideways glance, seemingly considering whether or not to answer her question. “You sound bitter for someone who got to survive the worst of the apocalypse in shelter,” he commented, but didn’t pause for her to respond. “We’re cracking north, towards Vault 111. Records indicate one of the scientists was working on some kind of gun that could shoot freezing bullets. Isn’t that wild?” He laughed out loud. “Just like out of a pre-war comic book. Anyways. I have no use for something like that, but if it exists, I’m gonna make a mint.”

His words seemed to amplify and echo between her ears. Vault 111! Where it all began. Of all the Vaults, it _had_ to be that one. Her vision began to darken. Opal concentrated on her breathing, wiling herself not to black out.

“Hoo! That struck a nerve there, huh, Sparky? You gonna be okay?” Kurt’s asinine, cocky voice broke through her trance.

Opal stopped in her tracks. “Do you know anything about that Vault? Did those pre-war records tell you _anything_? The place is a dead end. Literally. It was a cryo facility. Nothing but individual pods with dead bodies. I was the only dweller to walk out of that place, and I never looked back.”

Kurt stopped as well. “What? _That’s_ the Vault you came from?” He shook his head in awe. “Well, shit.” He clicked his tongue to call Joe Boy out of yet another puddle and began walking again. “Sounds like we know what to expect then, right?”

_Tunnel visioned jerk. All he cares about is the pay out._ She sniffed, not yet resuming her stride. _If I didn’t know better, I’d say he and MacCready were cut from the same cloth._

Kurt turned again and whistled. “Come on, Sparky! Come on, girl! Let’s go!”

Opal narrowed her brow. _Calling me like a dog. What a pig._ _Never mind, MacCready would never have done that, ever. This guy is pure asshole._ “Careful. I have sharp teeth, and I bite.” She flashed her bladed glove at him, and started walking once more.

“Terrifying,” he grinned. “About as scary as a kitten.”

Opal’s eye twitched. She swallowed the urge to kick him in the back of the knee. Instead, she picked up her pace and passed him. _The sooner this is all over…_

They approached the bridge into Sanctuary in the mid afternoon. Opal stopped on the far end of it. “I…I don’t want to go through there. Can we just cross the water where it’s shallow, further west, not cut through the settlement?”

Kurt turned and frowned. “Why? That’s dumb.   This is the fastest way to the Vault. I’m sure you must know that.”

“It’s not a big detour. I just don’t want to go through there. Come on, please?” Opal shifted her weight. She barely recognized the settlement from the outside, but she didn’t really want to walk back through and potentially get caught up talking with…someone, anyone, about the past.

“No. Just suck it up, let’s go.”

Opal took a deep breath, then followed Kurt across the bridge.

Sanctuary seemed to have completely blossomed in the last few years. Any structures left worth saving had been refurbished, even renovated with extensions. New shacks had been constructed and crops of all kinds were growing out of every portion of available dirt. A large water purifier had been constructed in the river, replacing the handful of pumps that existed last she lived there. The air smelled of roasting meat and was filled with the sounds of children laughing, workbench tinkering and even commerce.

“Place sure has changed,” she muttered to herself. _Mac’s never gonna believe that dumpy old Sanctuary has full-time stores, even a school. Can’t wait to tell him. I bet I can get him to wager some money on it, too._

“Hold up, there, y’all.” An Asian-featured man in a Minuteman uniform stepped off a guard post and approached them. His rifle was pointed at the ground but showed the tell-tale sign of being “on,” bright red lighting pulsed through it. “If you’re lookin’ to move in, you’re out of luck at the moment. We simply can’t take any extra folks right now.”

“We’re not here to move in,” Kurt replied casually, making to step into the settlement.

The man sidestepped to place himself in front of Kurt, causing the latter to stop walking. “We’re maxed out on merchants, too, and it’s pretty obvious you’re not a caravan.” He looked between them, a pitying expression on his face. “Now you’re more than welcome to come in, restock on whatever it is you need, but we don’t even have a proper inn right now. You’ll have to camp in the small tent city or outside the settlement.”

“No worries about that, my good man! The wife ‘n’ I are actually headed straight for the Vault, up the hill back there?” Kurt gestured vaguely towards the northwest, past the edge of the settlement. “Not often you get turned away at a settlement for being too full. Glad y’all are making a good go of it.”

“Oh yeah, the place is hopping. Keeps me in a job.” The Minuteman guard sighed. “My boyfriend and I were scavengers, before the baby. Take my advice and do _not_ have kids. Keeps you tied down. When you’re used to a nomadic lifestyle, it can be quite…jarring.”

Opal smiled. “Oh, no need to worry about that. The dog’s the only child we’re ever gonna have, right, _sweetheart?_ ”

“ _Honey_ ,” Kurt began, hitching himself to the shtick, “you know it would make my mom _so_ happy if we gave her a grandbaby.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Opal continued, “your mom’s happiness doesn’t amount to the caps it would cost to clothe it, diaper it, feed it, buy it a gun…”

“She’s got it right, bro,” the guard chimed in. “Stick with the dog. Just trust me.”

“Thanks for your opinion, _bro_ , but it’s really none of your goddamn business.” Kurt shifted the rifle strap across his chest and gently placed his arm behind Opal’s shoulder, leading her forwards. “Let’s get up to that Vault before the sun goes down, shall we?”

“You didn’t have to be that rude, _sugar muffin_. He was only trying to help.” Opal allowed herself to be steered through the settlement, past a couple houses and through what had become a tight alley between gardens, past another gate, and across that too familiar footbridge over what was still a pitiful creek. She pushed his hand off her back once they had crossed the bridge and began to ascend the hill.

“Nice improv there, Sparky,” Kurt complimented.

Opal didn’t react right away, expecting a “but.” When she realized it wasn’t going to come, she blushed. “Oh, well, thanks. A quick quip saved mine and Mac’s collective asses more than once. It’s a gift.”

The sun was beginning to threaten setting itself when they made it up to that chain link fence she would never forget seeing for the first time on October 23, 2077. The skeletons of her less fortunate neighbours remained littered about, destined to decay where they sat in the dry, cracked earth. Opal clenched her jaw tightly shut as she passed through the gate, from that direction, for the first time in over two hundred years. Joe Boy barked and dashed off ahead, and out of sight.

“Where’s he going?” Opal asked, feeling on edge. She didn’t see anything in her immediate view, and hadn’t yet seen the dog take off in that kind of an excited frenzy.

“You’ll see,” Kurt replied vaguely. An unsettled feeling clutched Opal’s stomach. She held the strap of her bag tighter, and continued to follow. The sky had turned into a striation of orange, yellow, red, and pink. Sparse clouds floated through the sky. The air was still and quiet. Any noise from the settlement had no reach up where they were. Opal wished she could enjoy the relative environmental peace. They rounded the broken down, ruined pre-war trailers to approach the elevator that went down to Vault. Joe Boy was soaking in attention from a female figure standing next to the elevator. She was flanked by three other figures.

Opal immediately slowed her pace. “What’s this? Who are those people?”

“Hey!” the woman called towards Kurt, straightening up. She was rigged up with a small arsenal. Ammunition belts featuring several types and sizes of bullets were wrapped around her arms and criss-crossed her chest and back. Her legs were similarly adorned, but with explosives. “What kept you?” She wore fingerless gloves, and a crimson red hood over her head, presumably for stealth.

“Hey, gorgeous,” Kurt cooed. He strode up to the woman and kissed her on the cheek. “I tried to get us out the door two nights ago, but she just wouldn’t have it.”

“Oh well,” the woman sighed, taking on a starry-eyed look towards Kurt. “You’re here, now. And you,” she continued, directing her attention at Opal, “what a piece of art you are!”

Opal hung back. She became acutely aware of the fact that all the other people were staring at her. Something didn’t seem quite right. “I don’t know what that means,” she finally admitted. “Are you all here to go into the Vault? Because, I told Kurt already, there’s nothing but bugs and corpses down there. Just…trust me.”

The woman looked to Kurt, an odd expression on her face. Kurt offered nothing, so she looked back at Opal. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

_This isn’t right. Clearly, Kurt is associated with these people, but he’s told me one story, and told them something else._ Reflexively, Opal took a step backward.

Kurt didn’t miss a beat. “You stop right there, Sparky. Ain’t no one gave you permission to leave.”

“What’s going on?” Opal asked flatly.

The woman sighed. “Honey, you’ve been had. Whatever story Kurt used to get you here, it was a lie.” 

Opal’s pulse started to echo loudly in her ears. Her mind went in a hundred different directions, and back, at once. If he wasn’t looking for a lucrative treasure, then what was he doing? If he wasn’t a mercenary, then what? If he was a hitman, why didn’t he just murder her at some point along the road?

“Christ,” swore one of the other men idling about, “you can almost see the smoke comin’ out of her ears.”

“Mm, not quick to the draw, there, is she?’ agreed the other.

“Darby, shut up and just…get a hold of her, will you?” Kurt chirped. Darby, the first man who had spoken, stepped towards Opal and reached to take her by the arm, but Opal stepped away.

“Don’t,” she growled. She approached Kurt and the woman, voluntarily. “I have no idea who you are,” she directed at the woman, then turned to Kurt. As expected, he had a bemused smirk on his face. “You need to tell me what is going on, right now.”

“I’m Samantha,” the woman piped in. Opal balked.

“Samantha? The one from…before?”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t mention that we got back together? Guess we didn’t get to that part of the story,” Kurt purred. “But, you weren’t real interested in talking, remember? ‘We aren’t friends,’ you kept saying.”

“What the fuck is going on?” Opal asked again, pausing between each word to emphasize her aggravation.

“Shit, Kurt, this is just cruel,” Samantha cooed. “Girl, there’s a bounty on your head the size of a mountain. We’ve been tryin’ to get our claws into you for _months_. Now we just need some confirmation that you’ve got some gross lookin’ scars on that leg of yours, and we’re good to go.”

Opal rounded on Kurt. “You said you’d only been in the Commonwealth for a matter of weeks!”

“Who can really keep track of time, out here?” Kurt brushed her off.

Opal felt humiliated. The reality that everything Kurt had said to her, and MacCready, in the past seventy-two hours had been lies, started to burn into her consciousness. They’d been duped so cleverly even MacCready had also fallen for it. “I trusted you.”

“That’s _your_ mistake. All I ever said was you were coming with me. The ‘why’ part, well…” He shrugged. “I tried the scavenger thing for a long time. Bounty hunting pays better. And damn if I ain’t good at it.”

She swallowed and looked between Kurt and Samantha’s faces. “What happens, now? Are you going to kill me?”

“Worse, actually. That’s why there’s so many of us. We gotta keep your tiny ass _alive_ to deliver you to the contractor. Otherwise, we don’t get paid.” Samantha cracked her knuckles, then pointed to one of the nearby trailers. “Orson, get that cleared out, and the one next to it, too. We can’t do anything until daylight. No sense in getting lost in the dark.”

“Babe, you don’t gotta be like that. I travel overnight all the time.” Kurt pawed at Samantha’s covered hair.

“You’ve been travelling hard for two days. Let’s take the time to freshen up and rest. Besides, if one of us has to carry Ms. Petite over there, it’ll slow us way down.”

_‘Sparky’, ‘Ms. Petite.’ Using my name would require they acknowledge I’m a person, with my own life. Probably makes the job easier for them if they don’t see me as an individual._ Opal trudged after Orson.

“Where are you going?” Kurt called after her.

“To bed. Wouldn’t want to keep you from collecting your bounty in a timely fashion, would I?” she spat back. Opal matched pace with Orson, then stepped ahead of him. He began to object. Opal ducked into the trailer and immediately began to toss out the assorted debris.

“What are you doing?” Orson demanded.

“Getting ready for bed! Goddamn it, are all of you such pathological liars that you just don’t listen the first time? I’m taking this trailer. If you get worried I’m going to sneak off over night, you can sleep outside the door yourself.” Opal toppled an abandoned filing cabinet out the door. It landed in the dirt with a satisfying crash. She slammed the door, then leaned her back against it, breathing heavily and closing her eyes. All attempts to still her thoughts were useless. She thought she heard Kurt making some smartass remark about a tantrum and drawing a simile to Sage, but she was too tired, hurt, confused, and scared, to bother adding that to her list of concerns.

Escape. She had to coordinate some kind of plan to get out of the pack, and get back home. It would have to be a solid plan, too, not some half-baked idea to take off and hope her luck held out.

_“No, dummy,”_ she heard MacCready’s voice in her mind. “ _This isn’t a kidnapping. They said there’s a bounty on you. They have spent months on a plan to get you out of your home, successfully. If you run away, they will find you. If you blindly slaughter them, another set of bounty hunters will just show up later.”_

She could almost see him clearly, in her mind’s eye. _What do I do, Mac? All those times you teased that I’d be dead or hopeless without you, and now…_

Imaginary MacCready shook his head. _“You know as well as I do what you’re capable of. This time, though, you have to premeditate it longer than ten seconds. There’s a lot more at stake, now, than just your life, or mine. There’s the Mayor’s club, and the kids.”_

She felt her heart rate lowering, her breathing becoming more normal. She’d contemplate on the weirdness of imagining her husband giving her a pretend pep talk later. For now, the image of him reassuring her was exactly what she needed.

_“You’re not going to like this, but it’s the only way: you’re going to have to go along with it. All of it. Find out who wants you dead. You get in, you work your charms, the hunters get paid somehow, and you come home.”_

Opal opened her eyes. _Yes. The only way is to pull this up by the roots._

_And if that doesn’t work,_ then _I kill them all._

Her nerves settled slightly. She took a deep breath, and blew a kiss to the window, releasing her thoughts of MacCready into the ether, before unrolling her sleeping bag across the cold aluminum floor of the trailer.

Opal was jarred awake to the sounds of heavy knocking on the trailer door. She sat up slowly, letting the sleeping bag fall off the top of her body, and looked out the window. It was barely dawn. _Kurt scores points for consistency, at least._ She yawned and stretched. The pounding on the door resumed.

“I’m awake!” she yelled. Opal crawled out of her sleeping bag, shivering in the relative coolness of the air outside the comfort of the thin polyester layers, and began to dress. Her entire body felt sore, and all kinds of joints popped and snapped as she pulled on her leather jumpsuit. She combed her fingers through her hair and pulled it into a ponytail, packed the rest of her things, and emerged from the trailer into the morning twilight.

“The princess appears! Morning, Sparky. Figured we’d hit the trail for some miles before breakfast, mostly because we have to _catch_ breakfast,” Kurt cooed as he fastened the buckle on one of his ammo belts.

Opal shrugged. “I don’t care, as long as I get fed. You wouldn’t want me to die of starvation on the trail, would you?”

“Cheeky,” Samantha replied.

“You don’t remember MacCready, do ya, Sam?” Kurt guffawed. “That guy _still_ has got a mouth on him.”

“Oh, I remember him, but not because of that.”

“So we heard!”

Opal trembled, feeling annoyed at Kurt’s obnoxiousness, and also embarrassed for her husband. Mac was certainly a lot of things, but didn’t deserve to be mocked while he wasn’t around to defend himself. She shifted the strap of her bag and walked past Kurt to meet Darby and Orson at the head of the road. “You’re such an asshole, Kurt,” she growled at him on her way by. In the growing light of the day, she got a better look at both Darby and Orson. Darby was taller, olive skinned, and kept his long, slick hair tied up in a braid down his back. He carried a modified baseball bat covered in barbed wire and iron spikes. She refused to be impressed by a fellow melee-focussed survivor.

Orson was taller than she but not as tall as Darby or Kurt. He had a military-style buzz cut and a goatee and brandished a weapon Opal had never seen before. It was some kind of projectile launcher, but hand-held, not like any other heavy weapon she’d encountered. Kurt and Samantha drew up to the rest of them. Samantha gestured towards the road.

“Off we go, then. Hope everyone got everything they needed.”

Kurt whistled, and Joe Boy came bounding out from the nearby trees, a dead squirrel in his mouth. He dumped it at Kurt’s feet, then sat back and wagged his tail excitedly. Kurt knelt and rubbed the dog on its head.

“You caught a squirrel, boy? That’s gross, did you know that’s gross? I don’t want a squirrel, not at all, not one bit,” he spoke in a happy sing-song voice, causing the dog to react as though he was being fully praised. Joe Boy jumped up and trotted to match pace with Samantha. Kurt kicked the carcass off the road with a sickening squelch. “So!” he began, leering over at Opal, “nice day, huh? Making you miss your days as a scavver merc?”

Opal ignored him, refusing to take the bait. The rest of the crew walked without speaking. The patter of all their collective footsteps sounded loud in the quiet of the sunrise, along that ruined roadway. 

Kurt chuckled. “Sorry, I forgot, we’re not friends.” He playfully bumped into Opal, who tensed and stepped away. He chuckled, again. She was not amused. “Well?Aren’t you gonna ask where we’re going? Who hates you so much as to put a ton of money on your head? What all the lies were for?” he pressed.

Opal grit her teeth and again, said nothing.

“Maybe she’s just too dumb to care,” Darby suggested from up front.

Kurt’s eyes nearly sparkled, merely adding to Opal’s already elevated blood pressure. “You gonna just take that from him?” he goaded her. She clenched her hands into fists and trembled, but restrained herself.


	4. Chapter 4

They plodded west along the broken road for a good hour. Joe Boy barked and dashed into a clearing, then paused, his backside pointed to the sky, tail wagging. He barked, again.

“Go get ‘em, boy!” Samantha encouraged him. The dog yipped in response, and jumped further into the clearing. Four mole rats erupted from the ground simultaneously and lunged towards the dog. The scene evoked long-forgotten images of cartoons Opal used to watch as a child.

The bounty hunters reacted like bloodthirsty anarchists. Darby dashed into the clearing, whooping and hollering, his modified baseball bat clutched in front of him in both hands. He swung and shattered one of the mole rat’s hind legs in a crackling of bones and blood. The mole rat squealed in its pain and fell, flailing, desperate to fight back. Darby’s next move was to crush the beast’s skull in a smooth swoop. Samantha pulled out a pistol and stood perfectly calm as one of the mole rats jumped to bite her. She unloaded two slugs from her pistol into its gaping maw and remained unmoving as the back of its head blew off, splattering brains and other assorted bones behind and way from it, causing its body to convulse in mid-air and land into the dirt, twitching.

Opal stayed completely out of the fray and merely watched. Joe Boy and one of the larger mole rats were circling each other, bellies low to the ground, tails in the air. Kurt and Orson were engaged in a set of rock, paper, scissors, to determine who would get the last one. Orson raised his arms in triumph over Kurt and immediately whipped out his odd projectile gun. Darby was standing on the neck of the fourth mole rat, holding it in place until the other two men had determined who would get it. He released it and jumped back, just in time for Orson to fire off a round that ripped through the mole rat’s midsection and disintegrating its abdomen into no more than a large stain on the packed earth. The final mole rat jumped at Joe Boy, breaking their stalemate. The dog skipped aside and dug its teeth into the mole rat’s throat, ripping a hunk out of its flesh. The mole rat shrieked, over and over, scrabbling around in the dirt, before fully bleeding out and collapsing onto the ground.

“Woo!” Kurt hollered, clapping his hands. “Good show, good show!” He looked over at Opal, who had perched herself on a boulder.  “Not impressed, Sparky?”

“At what, your group’s ability to make a huge mess of some mole rats?”

“You’re just jealous you didn’t get a piece of the action.”

Opal clenched her jaw and searched her bag for some water. Darby had begun digging out a shallow pit for a fire, while Orson gathered some wood to burn. Samantha had tasked herself with carving some salvageable meat from three of the mole rats, while Joe Boy loudly tore into the one whose belly had been shot out.

“Eat up, Petite,” Samantha instructed, shoving a battered metal plate with a greasy mole rat steak under Opal’s nose. It had been a half hour since the butchering of the beasts, and the group had assembled themselves around the cooking fire. Opal accepted the plate wordlessly and glanced around at the others, gnawing and chewing their breakfasts. Joe Boy, already full from eating his meat raw, was curled at Kurt’s feet and napping.

The smell of the meat wasn’t even all that unappealing. It had been grilled over a wood fire and seasoned with some salt and pepper. It was also the first hot food Opal had had in three days. Her stomach growled in anticipation. The meat was more chewy than tender, but she wasn’t about to complain. Mole rats weren’t exactly the fattiest creatures.

Opal was wiping the remaining grease off her fingertips onto the back of her leather jumpsuit, when Kurt grabbed her plate and tossed it onto the ground in front of Joe Boy. The dog immediately perked up and began licking the plate clean. “Time to go. Still gonna be a few days before we get close to Nas.”

“Nas?” Opal repeated. Darby stood behind her and pushed her off her rock, forcing her to stand.

“If you need to piss, say so, now,” Samantha said, instead.

_I guess I’ll find out when we get there._ Opal pulled the strap of her bag over her head and shoulders and gestured. “Lead on.”

The group continued their northwestern trajectory along the ruined, long abandoned highway. With every step she took, Opal tried to make a concrete plan for getting out of her situation, though she found her lack of ideas truly frustrating. _I know I need a plan. I can’t just roll with it, like I always do. I have to show up with a counter offer, of sorts._

_Like what?_ She took a breath and watched some birds, disturbed by the group’s approach, flutter up into the sky, squawking their protest. She returned her gaze to the back of Samantha and Orson’s heads as they walked along the path. Opal’s eyes shifted down to the several belts of ammunition strapped to Samantha’s legs. _That kind of outfit would not come cheap._ “How much?”

Orson glanced back to look at her, before refocusing on the road. “What?”

“I said, how much?”

“It won’t work,” Samantha replied, keeping her eyes forward.

Darby knocked his elbow into her shoulder from behind, causing Opal to misstep, though she caught herself easily. “You can’t afford us.”

“Sorry, Sparky,” Kurt’s voice painted a picture of the obnoxious grin that Opal knew he had to be carrying, “we know that’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. The traditional ‘my family has more money than you’re offered, let me pay you to spare my life’.”

“Pay you off? Did I say that? I was wondering how much you’d been offered to bring me in.” She pulled off a fingernail that had split, wincing as it ripped out of her nail bed and began to bleed. Kurt stepped up to match pace with her as she put her bleeding finger into her mouth.

“You think you can figure out who put the bounty on you, based on how much it’s worth? Guarantee that ya won’t.”

Opal removed her finger from her mouth to respond. “Not who, but _why_. I haven’t been on the beat in years. I’m basically just a housewife, really.”

“So what?”

“So, how could I, as a person, possibly be worth four bounty hunters? By now, the wasteland has nearly forgotten all about the Institute, and they terrorized the place for decades. I’ve only been… _active_ for about five years.” She chose her words carefully. Her finger was still bleeding. She replaced it in her mouth.

“You just are,” growled Samantha from the front.

“Oh, Sparky,” Kurt cooed, reaching with his left arm to place it around Opal’s shoulders. She immediately tensed at the unwelcome gesture. Kurt pulled her closer to his body. His ancient bomber jacket still gave off a slight leathery scent, though tobacco and sweat nearly overpowered it completely. His mole rat breakfast was heavily threaded through his breath. “We don’t ask ‘why,’ because that’s not the point, right? It’s never the point. We get shown the money up front and we take the job. It’s why bounty hunting is better than being a cash-for-kills merc. Any asshole with a gun and decent aim can be a merc, but capturing someone and taking them in alive? Double the work, so, double the pay.”

Opal pulled her injured finger from her mouth and made to elbow Kurt off of her. He caught her by the wrist, instead, and gripped it painfully. “Ow! Let g—“

“Alive don’t mean not broken or roughed up some,” he interrupted darkly. “Personally, I’d hate to add any more scars to that pretty face of yours, so…” Kurt pulled her bleeding finger towards his open mouth. Opal trembled, horrified, her own mouth gaping open as she pulled her wrist in a desperate attempt to release it from his grip.

“Quit fucking with her,” Darby chastised from behind them.

“Or just fuck her,” added Orson. Samantha’s head snapped to face him with daggers in her eyes. “Oh, I mean…uh, oops.” He clamped his mouth shut and turned to face the road. Kurt laughed at the exchange, loosening his grip enough that Opal was able to pull free 

“Not interested, anyways, thanks,” she added dryly. She looked down at her finger and hoped the bleeding had slowed down. She couldn’t bear the thought of putting it back into her mouth after all that.

“Shut your goddamn mouths, all of you,” Samantha barked, stopping cold. “Any of you assholes smell smoke?”

Joe Boy barked a reply, his hackles and ears up. Everyone looked around. Orson pointed into the trees, off to the west. “There, I see it coming from over there.” Joe Boy took that as a command and bounded off the road, barking.

“No! Come back here, you dumb dog!” Kurt called after him. Joe Boy did not heed his owner’s instruction and continued into the trees and out of sight. A loud crash sounded, followed by the dog’s startled yelp, then whining. “Oh, god damn it,” Kurt muttered, then took off after the dog.

Samantha sighed, then motioned with her head to follow. Darby grabbed Opal by the arm and pushed her ahead of them. She trudged along, following the sound of Joe Boy’s crying. They came upon oubliette dug into the ground that had been covered with dead grass and sticks, Kurt kneeling next to it and calling comforts down to the dog inside. Samantha sighed again, placing both hands on her hips and looking around. Opal carefully leaned over the edge and looked down into the oubliette to see the dog was pacing around, unable to climb the bald walls of the pit to escape.

“He’s not too hurt,” Orson vocalized her thoughts for her.

“How the hell do we get him out?” Darby wondered.

Kurt rose and dust his hands off on each other. “Whoever’s camped at that fire is probably some hunter who dug this to catch a radstag. I’ll just go over there and let ‘em know they caught my dog by mistake.”

The sound of several guns being snapped to the ready caught them all by surprise. Opal turned her back on the oubliette, slowly, to see they’d been surrounded while they were all distracted by the dog’s plight. “Won’t be any need for that, partner,” drawled a shirtless man pointing a shotgun towards Kurt. “Weren’t no mistake. Trap worked as perfect as neccess’ry, eh, y’all?”

The others surrounding the group chuckled their replies. Opal slowly raised her hands, her heart rate escalating and her stomach fluttering. Two shotguns, a pipe pistol, a hunting rifle, and one combat knife were all held at the ready, and pointed towards the group.

Kurt flung himself down at the shirtless man’s feet and began to wail. “Come on now, sir, that ain’t right, I tell ya that ain’t _right_!” He sobbed. Opal shifted her glance using her eyes only, from Kurt, over to Samantha, standing on the other side of him. The latter’s eyes were wide, an overall look of disgust on her face. Kurt continued to blubber into the dirt. “Settin’ a trap just to take a man’s _dog_? It ain’t right!”

“Shit, Brent, ya went and made the biggun’ cry,” groaned the other man with a shotgun. He was not shirtless, but wearing a ripped and very dirty t-shirt over equally filthy jeans and a mismatched pair of boots. Samantha made to reach over and touch Kurt on the back, but stopped dead as a bullet fired from the pipe pistol landed in the dirt in front of her toes.

“No one fucking move!” cried the young man brandishing said pistol. His hands seemed to tremble, as though he’d never fired the weapon before that shot. He wore a pair of overalls without a shirt underneath, which showed off a dark scar that had been carved into his upper left arm.

“All you had to do was keep the damn mutt on a leash,” Opal said, directing her gaze and words towards Kurt. “I kept telling you, he was gonna run off some day and then you’d be sorry, and here we are.”

“Shuh-shut up!” he snorted in response, continuing to sob. “You don’t put huntin’ dogs on leashes, woman, we’ve been th-through this!”

“It’s just a dog,” growled Brent.

“No,” Opal sighed, “that dog was the last thing his dead dad gave to him, before the mirelurk snipped off both his arms and legs when the trap wasn’t set right.”

“ _DADDY!”_ Kurt bellowed, flinging his face back down into the dirt in a new cascade of sobs. Opal chanced a quick glance around at the trappers and bounty hunters alike, who all appeared as confused as the next. She tried not to let too much of a satisfied smile show on her lips.

“Oh, knock it off, would you?” Brent said, exasperated, dropping his gun to the side and nudging Kurt’s head with his boot. Kurt must have been watching, because he immediately burst up, grabbed the gun with his left hand, and fired it into Brent’s right foot. Brent howled in agony as his foot exploded into several bony, bloody shards. Uninterrupted, Kurt took full hold of the shotgun and cracked the butt of it into the side of Brent’s face, who fell to the ground, unconscious.

The other trappers froze long enough in their shock for Orson and Samantha both to be able to pull their weapons out. Samantha squeezed off a few rounds from her pistol. Opal scrambled away from the edge of the oubliette towards the trees to take cover, when she was suddenly tackled to the ground.

“Take it easy, Sparky!” Kurt purred into her ear. Opal twitched but was unable to free herself at all. Kurt stood up and hauled her with him, leading her further into the thicket to a tree with a lower hanging, long branch. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs and snapped one side over the branch and locked the other around her right wrist. The height of the branch forced her to keep her arm held up and completely useless.

“What the hell are you doing?!” she screamed at him. “I’m right handed, you idiot!”

Kurt feigned surprise. “You are? Gee, that never came up in any of our non-conversations since we’re not friends.”

“You’re leaving me here defenseless!”

“Can’t have you takin’ off in all the confusion. I’ll be back for ya, don’t worry. Thought I just finished tellin’ ya that if you die, I don’t get paid.” Kurt turned to leave, then stepped back towards her and held his face uncomfortably close to hers. “Damn shame about things, though,” he breathed.

“What are you talking about?” she dared ask.

He flicked out his tongue and licked her upper lip and the tip of her nose. Opal shoved him off, groaning in her disgust, then wiped her face with the back of her left hand. “You’re such a fucking pig!”

Kurt made a bite motion with his teeth, winked, then turned and returned to the firefight in earnest.

“No!” she shrieked in her rage. Opal yanked fruitlessly against the binding of the handcuffs, rattling them. “No, no, no, no, NO!” she raged, pulling her wrist away from the branch with every execution of the word. She kicked the trunk of the tree, huffing.

A growl from behind her broke her attention from the tree, to a larger than typical, wild mongrel. Its jaws were dripping with saliva and its ribs were clearly visible underneath its skin. Her tantrum had drawn it from the woods.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she repeated, her tone and demeanour completely different with the second string. “Uh, easy there, boy. Or, girl? Easy, now.” Opal held out her free hand and used her most soothing voice, though it was wrapped with fear and panic.

The mongrel merely sneered and growled. It crouched lower to the ground and took slow steps towards here.

Opal frantically searched the ground and kicked a nearby rock in the mongrel’s direction. It skipped and rolled safely wide of the beast. “Stay back!” She kicked another rock that bounced off a root of the tree to ping off its nose. It snapped its jaws and snorted.

The firefight continued in the background. Calling for help would just be useless. The mongrel lunged, its gaping maw aiming for Opal’s ankles. She yelped and jumped out of the way, her body whipping back against the tree in recoil from being handcuffed to the branch, smacking the back of her head against its hardened, dead bark. The sudden swinging gave her an idea. She kicked at the mongrel again, and missed. It seemed to grin, gathered itself, and lunged once more. Opal braced herself on the branch with both hands, then lifted both legs and kicked her heels into the mongrel’s face. Her feet met its snout and let forth a sickening snap. The mongrel squealed in its pain and ducked its head, stepping off to assess its injury.

Opal wasted no time. She pulled herself under and behind the branch, then reached up with both arms and attempted to haul herself up into the tree. Her right arm already felt tired and burned with the build up of lactic acid in her muscles, and her strength failed her. Refusing to give up, she tried to hop and kick herself off the trunk as a launch point. Her chin and collarbone landed awkwardly on top of the branch, but it was enough to allow her to swing her left leg up and over. She panted, straddling the branch, and looked for the mongrel on the ground. She found it, licking the blood dripping from its maw, appearing even angrier than ever.

It began to howl in a series of yips and caws, over and over. From the trees and brush to her right emerged two more of the beasts, smaller in size, but looking just as thin and hungry as the first. One broke into a sprint, without hesitation, and flung itself from the ground to bite at her booted foot. It nearly caught it.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Opal bellowed. She wished so desperately that her weaponized right hand wasn’t attached to that tree. She could envision at least four different ways she would have been able to take them all on and rip all of their throats out. Instead, she found herself pulling her body towards the trunk of the tree and carefully lifting each leg so as to perch precariously, bracing herself with her left hand against the trunk as best as she could.

The firefight seemed to have died down, or ended. Gunfire could no longer be heard from the direction of the oubliette. _Should I call for help?_ Opal frowned and strained her eyes, looking for any sign of a bounty hunter coming her way. She had no doubt that Kurt wasn’t joking about coming back for her; he wouldn’t just leave his payout stranded in a tree. She just hoped they returned sooner than later.

Joyous sounds from humans and a dog alike made their way to her ears. Opal could only assume they had managed to free Joe Boy from his trap. _Good, that means they should be heading this way, soon._ She looked down at the growling, frothing mongrels that had settled themselves at the base of the tree. “You hear that, you ugly sons of bitches? I hope you’re ready to get your heads blown off.”

As if on cue, Joe Boy crashed through the bushes, no worse for wear of his ordeal. He growled low, then lunged towards one of the smaller mongrels. He caught it by the leg, sinking his teeth into its thin flesh, causing it to yip and kick Joe Boy off, then limp as quickly as it could back into the bushes it came from. The second smaller mongrel hung back while the larger one confronted the dog, circling it and growling, reminding Opal of the scene that morning between Joe Boy and the mole rat.

Suddenly, the original mongrel’s head popped in a squelch from the bullet of Samantha’s pistol. It fell to the ground, twitching. Joe Boy hopped up and sniffed the carcass, before turning around and lifting his leg.

_Classic._ Opal looked down, careful not to make a sudden movement to toss her off her balance. “Help! Get me down from here!”

Samantha holstered her pistol and gave Opal an incredulous look. “The fuck? Just climb down same as you got up there, dumbass.”

“Oh, I would love to, but there’s the small problem of being handcuffed to the tree.” Opal lifted her right hand slightly to emphasize the shackle on her wrist.

“You’re…what?!”

Darby entered the area, followed by Kurt. “I’m comin’, I told you I would,” he was calling from the trees. The moment he had a clear view of Opal squatting on the branch, he burst out laughing so hard, he clutched his gut and nearly fell over.

Samantha rounded on him. “You think that’s funny, you galoot?! What if she falls from up there? She could break her neck, then this would’ve all been for nothing!”

Kurt panted between guffaws and wiped the tears from his eyes. “Relax, Sam, she wouldn’t break her neck. The cuffs’d keep her from landing on the ground.” He looked past Samantha and up at Opal, who was scowling at him in the tree. “The poor widdle kitten, caught in da twee?”

“Just let her down,” Darby muttered, shaking hair and blood off of his spiked bat.

“I’m getting to it,” Kurt spat, his demeanour suddenly appearing annoyed. “God damn, sometimes it’s like none of y’all like to just have a little fun. Go help Orson gather some supplies in the camp, will you?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were getting off on her being stuck up there,” Samantha added coolly.

Kurt shrugged, then winked. “It’s not hurting anybody.” He plunged his hands into his jean pockets, when a confused look crossed his face. He checked his back pockets, and laughed. “Seems I left the key in my bag, Sparky. I’ll be right back.”

“Ugh,” Samantha groaned. “I’ll meet you at the camp. Come on, Joe Boy.”

Just like that, Opal was alone once more. She sighed and rested her head against the tree trunk. A rustling below caught her attention. She opened her eyes, expecting the smug looking Kurt to have reappeared, but the image was much worse. Brent, bloodied, and an eye swollen completely shut, crouched on the ground below, pointing his shotgun towards her in the tree.

“No, oh no no no, stop!” Opal cried, raising her left hand in protest. 

He cocked the shotgun, and fired. Reflexively, she pulled her shoulder over, and screamed as the hot scattershot ripped easily through her leather jumpsuit and into her flesh and bone. Her left foot slipped off the branch and she had no way to compensate, fully losing her balance and sliding completely off the limb. She screamed, again, as the bones in her right wrist snapped and shattered against the restraint with the force of her fall. Agony wracked her body, her pulse thundering in her temples and ears, and she blacked out.


	5. Chapter 5

Opal was strongly aware of her breathing, her heartbeat, and the sound of a crackling fire, but everything remained dark. There was so much pain. The wrist on her right arm burned and felt many times larger than usual. She didn’t dare attempt move a single finger on that hand. Her entire left shoulder, front, top, and back, was stinging as well. It felt bruised, and stiff. Her breathing quickened, coming in and out of her mouth in hushed puffs.

“Give me a single reason not to cut you out of your share, right now!” Samantha’s voice was shrill, but slightly distant, as though she were in another room.

“ _Me?_ ” the annoyed reply from Kurt. “You’re the one who left her alone!”

“Ooooooh, don’t you _dare_ try to blame that on me. I’m not the one who handcuffed her there to begin with, you suck fuck!”

“I wasn’t gonna strand her there, but I couldn’t risk her taking off in the firefight, you know, _for the bounty_?”

“What, that pit in the ground wasn’t good enough?” Samantha scoffed. “Kurt Bleishtift, sometimes you thoroughly disgust me.”

“It was an unfortunate accident, but she’ll recover. It’s flesh wounds and some broken bones, nothing _fatal_ –“

“Unless she catches an infection, dumbass!” Samantha interrupted. “God, Kurt! You and your twisted dick –“

“Twisted dick?” He sounded amused.

“Don’t interrupt me, you know what I mean! Your twisted…whatever that shit is, that bee-dee-ess-emm crap, in those magazines you found, _you know what I mean_.”

“You didn’t sound this pissed off about it those times I tied you up, myself,” Kurt purred.

“Stop it. This is serious! You’re not a doctor, none of us are! That mangled mess of a woman is fifty thousand caps that could slip through our fingers.”

Opal’s eyes snapped open at the quoted figure. Fifty thousand! _No, that can’t be. I’ve heard that wrong, I know it._

“Babe,” Kurt cooed, “we’ll sort this. Darby set her wrist and pulled out most of the scattershot. Until the swelling goes down a bit, he can’t go looking for the other pellets. We’ll keep it clean and disinfected and get her looked at proper when we get to Nas, if you want. I’m sure they’ve got some sort of doc.”

Samantha muttered something but Opal couldn’t hear it from where she was. With her eyes open, she could see there was a fire burning on the other side of Kurt’s canvas tent. It was a large, orange glowing blob against the fabric. Her breath quickened as she considered sitting up, but the stinging in her shoulder gave her the sense that she’d better not move, if she could help it. They had tucked her in to her own sleeping bag, it appeared.

_How long was I out?_ she wondered, turning her head to look straight up to the roof of the tent. _Most of the day, I guess._ Muscle spasms raced through her fingers, sending shooting pain firing up through her arm. “Ahaaa,” she moaned reflexively, squeezing her eyes shut and breathing through the pain.

There was a sudden, hushed silence that fell outside the tent. “Someone’s awake,” Samantha said softly. Within seconds, Opal heard the opening of the tent rustle and felt a presence looming over her. She opened her eyes to the dark silhouette of Samantha, herself. “Well, seems you’re alive, after all.”

“Not my first gunshot wound,” Opal croaked. Her mouth and throat felt extremely dry. “Water? Please?”

“Yeah.” Samantha reached behind her and pulled out a canteen, twisted the lid off, then held it out. “Sit up.”

Opal bit her tongue, summoning all of her strength to pull herself up using her core and avoid leaning on her arms. Samantha seemed to smirk, deliberately remaining still and watched her struggle. Opal pulled her legs up as much as she could from within the confines of the sleeping bag and used that as the leverage she needed to sit upright. Her breath panted out in shallow puffs.

Samantha held the canteen to Opal’s lips and gently tilted it. The water was tepid, but clean, and therefore sufficiently refreshing. She drank slowly, almost feeling the water rush down her throat and into her stomach. Samantha took back the canteen and closed it. “I’ll get you some more in a sec. How do you feel?”

“Very stiff, very sore, very swollen.” Opal didn’t bother with trying to be witty.

“Mm. It’s gonna hold us back another day, but we’ll stick around here tomorrow, give you enough time to scab up. You’re no good to us if –“

“If I’m dead, yeah, I got that,” Opal shuddered, recalling how Kurt had pulled her close while he threatened he’d rough her up if he had to. _Guess he got what he wanted._

Samantha nodded. “I’ll get you some more water.”

“Great.” Opal watched the bounty hunter leave the tent, and closed her eyes. She didn’t lay back down, wanting instead not to have to pull herself back up when Samantha returned. She brooded on the idea that someone had put fifty thousand caps on her head and wondered who she had pissed off to want her hauled away from her family for such a reckoning. Her mind searched through faces and situations but nothing stuck out. Nuka World, perhaps? Had one of the gang leaders survived, and tracked her down?

The tent rustled again and Opal opened her eyes, expecting the return of Samantha, but instead was presented with the large form of Kurt. “You’re in pain?”

“I’ll let you guess. You have fifty-fifty odds.”

Kurt merely nodded and reached into his jacket, pulling out a handful of assorted items. Opal couldn’t make out any particular thing in the low light. He made a selection, dumped the other items back into his pocket, then leaned forward to wrap his arm around her back and pull her against him.

“ _Let go!_ ” she growled into his ear, feeling completely repulsed by his touch, and powerless to push him away.

“Settle,” he replied gruffly. He reached down and pulled up the back of her shirt. Opal trembled, then jerked reflexively, causing the binding on the back of her shot shoulder to shift and pull open several of the wounds. Kurt held her tighter in an attempt to stop her from moving. “I said _settle_ , for cryin’ out loud.” There was a sharp, jabbing pain in her lower back, and then a vaguely familiar spreading of warmth and numbness. Opal sighed in her relief. Kurt released her and sat back up. “Next time I’ll just let you suffer.”

“Doubt it,” she smiled, her inhibition dissolving as quickly as her pain. “You _like_ me.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re one twisted motherfucker but _you_ _like me_ ,” Opal sang the last three words, unable to help herself. She swayed, slightly, the chem beginning to make her head feel fuzzy.

“Would you shut up?” he hissed. He grabbed her right bicep and yanked her towards him, his face hovering extremely close once more. “I like to fuck around, but not – shit, no, _that’s_ not –“

Opal burst out laughing, interrupting his backpedalling. “What’s with you, man, is this still about MacCready? From years’n’years ago?” The Med-X hit her hard, and fast. “You’re…you’re, like, jealous, or something.” She giggled. “ _Issues_.”

Kurt growled, then released her with a push. Opal flung her right hand out behind her to brace herself and immediately regret it. The chem had melted away the ambient pain but couldn’t stop the explosion of agony resulting from putting weight on her broken wrist. She cried out, whipping her arm out from underneath her, and crashing onto her back on the ground.

The tent flung open and Samantha re-appeared. “The fuck did you do? Ain’t she beat enough?” she yelled at Kurt. Somehow she’d missed the conversation, or simply chose to have ignored it.

“She fell, I didn’t do anything!” he lied in protest. Samantha had none of it.

“Get out!”

Kurt’s eyes flickered, but he did as he was told. Samantha flung the canteen onto Opal’s lap. “Here’s your damn water. We’ll deal with you in the morning.” With that, she slipped out of the tent after Kurt.

Opal’s wrist was throbbing. She didn’t dare risk moving it more. She reached down with her left hand to pick up then toss the canteen down next to her. Her throat was feeling thick and fuzzy from the chem, and her entire body was numb and exhausted. She closed her eyes and fell asleep.

She woke the next day, sunlight blaring into the tent through its canvas. The breeze outside rustled the branches of the trees. Somewhere nearby, someone was firing off a gun. Opal inhaled slowly through her nostrils, then placed her left elbow beneath her and pushed herself up. Her shoulder felt tender, but her right wrist was the worst. It felt completely locked up and any slight movement from her fingers made her whole arm react in pain. She pulled the sleeping bag off her body with her left hand, grunting through the bruising, struggling to release her legs. Finally she sat there, in her t-shirt and boyshorts, staring at the scars on her leg and relishing the cool breeze wafting in through the break in the canvas to cool the sweat on her face.

Without meaning to, her quickest thought jumped to breakfast for the kids and planning out the day behind the bar of the common room. Homesickness enveloped her like a sudden plunge in cold water. Her breath caught in her throat and she feared she would start crying. Opal wished desperately she was waking up in her bed to a nagging, hungry toddler, next to her husband who had spread himself across the majority of their bed, again. She wanted a bath, she wanted her home, she wanted a damn cup of coffee. Her right hand twitched at the final thought and she flinched in the pain. She gasped and looked down at her hand, then gasped again. Her fingers had swollen outside the binding, appearing foreign and grotesque. Darby had wrapped a stay above and below her wrist, making it impossible for her to flex, but hopefully setting the bones to heal properly.

Nothing about the entire excursion had been right. She idly wondered how long it took Kurt to manufacture the story about the vault, and the treasure. She wondered if Samantha really had a child. She wondered how much of everything she’d heard was pure lie, or just lie by omission.

She needed to go outside, or risk dissolving into a fit of tears. As though it refused to be forgotten, her injured shoulder stung as the bandages crackled dryly while she shifted, scabs breaking. She swallowed, though her throat was completely dry, and looked for the water canteen. Opal located it beside the sleeping bag and tenderly reached for it with her left hand. She held it between her knees and twisted the cap off with her left hand, then raised it to her lips. She emptied it and wiped the dribble off her chin. Her stomach responded with a hungry gurgling. She glanced around the tent but saw it was devoid of anything but her sleeping bag, the canteen, and herself. Her bag was stored somewhere else.

Opal stiffly pulled herself onto her knees, then a crouch, and stepped out of the tent into the daylight. She raised her arm to shield her eyes from the brightness and guessed it was mid-morning. The fire she saw through the tent canvas from the night before was just a pit of blackened, spent wood. Simple benches of fallen logs had been assembled around it, decorated with empty beer bottles. She continued to squint and peer around the site.  The trapper’s shack was a single story house with a deck and what appeared to be a refinished roof.

“Kurt?” she called out before she could stop herself. “Anyone?”

“You’re awake,” replied a voice from behind her. Opal turned to see Orson coming past the tent with an armful of wood salvaged from the surrounding trees. He dumped them unceremoniously next to the fire pit and dusted off his hands. “Figures, the second I leave my post to do somethin’ productive, out you walk.”

“Where are my things?”

“In the house. Didn’t want to make it easy for you to creep off during the night while we were sleepin’.”

Opal rolled her eyes. “With a completely broken wrist and a bleeding shoulder?”

“I’ve seen people try more with worse,” he shrugged, leading her into the shack and pointing into a corner. “Yer bag’s over there. Need any help getting dressed?”

She turned, her face burning, but saw his offer was genuine. Her frown softened, but only slightly. “I’ll let you know.”

He shrugged again. “I’ll be out here, havin’ a smoke.”

“Good to know.” Opal knelt and busied herself by picking through her bag with her left hand. She located some jeans, a clean t-shirt, and a light grey sweater. She inspected the sweater more closely. The smell of tobacco was practically weaved into the yarn. She’d packed one of MacCready’s sweaters by accident.

_That’s not going to help the homesickness._ She elected to wear it, anyways, hoping its looser fit would disturb her injuries less than something tighter. Opal was able to awkwardly pull the jeans on using her single useable hand, but couldn’t devise a method of changing her t-shirt without disturbing her wrist or her shoulder too much. Every movement that caused even a pinch of pain, she stopped and tried something else.

“Orson? I need some help,” she sighed, defeated. Orson re-appeared, looking indifferent.

“With what?”

Opal pointed to the faded green t-shirt at her feet. Orson grunted. “Turn around, then, and lift yer arms.”

Opal did as he instructed. Orson was surprisingly gentle as he lifted her sweaty, blood stained t-shirt up, off each arm individually, then over her head. He grunted, again.

“Stay put. Those bandages should be changed. Darby left some salve, too.”

Opal shivered, then nodded. She listened to Orson’s footsteps retreat, a hollow sound against the wood of the shack floor, and exit onto the packed earth outside. She occupied herself with how she was going to apologize to MacCready about taking one of his sweaters, by accident. _“At least I didn’t get any bullet holes in it_ ,” she would say with a smirk on her face.

A sudden fear clutched her gut. _I really hope I make it back home._ The weight of her injuries and the gravity of being sold to a headhunter, were starting to nibble at her resolve. Her lip trembled, and she found herself on the brink of tears again.

Footsteps behind her broke her of her thoughts. Orson had returned. “Look, can you come outside? Makes more sense to dress your shoulder if I can see properly in the sunlight.”

Opal figured everyone had already seen her in her skivvies, in the wake of her accident, so she merely picked up her shirts and followed. Orson pointed her to a stool, and she flopped onto it, not saying a word.

“Some of the bandage has stuck, so this might not feel too good.” He began to peel the dried and stiff bandage off of her skin. Opal couldn’t help but flinch and jump when it pulled out scabs that had healed into the bandage. After what seemed like hours, he had removed the entire thing, and let it drop to the ground next to her feet. She glanced down to see the majority of the stain was dark red, brown, and only slightly tinged with yellow.

“So…how is it looking?” she asked, anyway.

“It’s good. Well, for a scattershot wound that ripped you up. I guess I meant, it looks like it’s healing. Deep breath, girl.” Before Opal could say anything, Orson was applying pressure to a point just below her armpit. She cried out, and suddenly it was over. “Found some shot still in there, squeezed it out. Otherwise it looks like you’re lead free.”

“Darby did that?”

“He’s gifted,” Orson mumbled, dabbing at the spot then tossing down the rag.

“I heard Samantha. She said none of you were doctors.”

“No, not _doctors_. Doctors wipe noses and dish out pills. Darby was trained from when he was little in ‘first response,’ so he can fix all kinds of injuries, barely needs to even think about it.”

Opal closed her eyes and shook her head. “She made me think things were a lot worse.”

“Eh, well,” Orson began patting a refreshing substance against her wounds. It tingled slightly but seemed to be numbing the area as well. “Samantha’s good at the fine details. She’s saved our skins with her annoying habit of splitting hairs more often than with those guns of hers.” He nudged her gently. “Lift your arm.” Opal complied and he began wrapping fresh linen around her shoulder.

“You’re all pretty tight knit, then.”

“I guess.” His hand appeared sticking out from behind her, palm up. Opal placed the t-shirt into his hand and raised her arms. “We all kind of fell in to each other, Sam, Darby, an’ me, some years ago. Kurt’s been independent until this job. He heard tell of it, knew his old flame was operating, and here we are.” He held his hand out again, for the sweater. Becoming encased in her husband’s clothing, enrobed in scents so identifiably him despite laundering, Opal felt almost comfortable. She sighed.

_It seems Kurt and Samantha haven’t been back together for very long. Wonder if I can use that against them? Break them up, or cause them to kill each other?_

_“Dramatic,”_ MacCready’s voice bubbled into her mind, _“but a price that high? Surprised you haven’t met other bounty hunters looking to cash in on you.”_ In her mind, he shrugged, and smirked. _“Let them bicker. It’s entertaining, at least.”_

Orson tossed her stained t-shirt into her lap, breaking her reverie. “Now, you need calories. Hope you like eggs.”

“Eggs? How are there eggs?” Opal never heard the tell-tale sounds of chickens.

“Trappers had a few hens. Eggs now, chicken later.”

That explained it, then. Just as Orson was setting a metal plate of scrambled eggs onto Opal’s lap, Kurt, Samantha, and Darby showed up. Joe Boy followed at Kurt’s heels. Kurt hauled a radstag behind him, while Samantha and Darby carried a large assortment of wild herbs, berries, and grasses. Darby paused in front of her.

“You look a little less pale than yesterday. How’s the pain?” he asked.

Opal swallowed a mouthful of scrambled egg in her mouth. “Bearable. Orson dressed my shoulder. Every little twitch of my right hand hurts like a bitch, though.”

Darby nodded and knelt in front of her, taking her right hand very gently into his left and looking it over. “Best I could tell, most of it was clean break but the handcuffs probably shattered some bone into more pieces. Two months to heal, minimum.”

Opal’s stomach sunk at the news. She closed her eyes and swallowed down some nausea.

“I know,” he offered, “it’s shitty.”

“She’ll be lucky to be alive in two months,” Samantha added casually, stepping into the shack.

“Comforting,” Opal muttered. She focused her attention back to her eggs and watched Darby stand from the corner of her eye. Kurt seemed to have disappeared around the back of the shack without offering a glance, nor a word. Opal preferred it that way.

The day progressed uneventfully, by the wasteland’s standards. By midafternoon, Darby expressed concern over her swollen fingers and how they hadn’t subsided, and re-wrapped her set wrist. Opal couldn’t tell any difference, as it still hurt the same. Orson was kicked back in an ancient lawn chair, facing out into the woods towards the road, taking his guard duty very casually with a beer and his gauss rifle propped against his leg. Kurt and Samantha were having a heated argument behind the shack. Opal couldn’t hear specific words, but their voices carried out through the surroundings.

“Been bickerin’ all goddamn day,” Darby muttered, tying off her arm for the second time in twenty-four hours. “Unprofessional.”

“About what?” Opal tried.

“Basically everything. Samantha’s on a tear. She was already pissed off about him bein’ late, and she thinks Kurt crossed a major line by cuffin’ you to that tree. She hasn’t let up about it, and he hasn’t apologized.”

“Why would he apologize? He’s not sorry.”

“Yeah. Problem is, she thinks he _should_ be.” Darby wiped his hands off on his pants, collected his instruments, and stood. “I’ve heard it about ten times. Do you need some water?”

Opal shook her head to decline.

Orson roasted one of the chickens over the fire, using beer as baste, for their dinner later that evening. A heavy awkwardness settled over the camp. Kurt and Samantha hardly spoke to each other over the course of the entire meal, and neither Darby nor Orson were much for words by nature.

“Should we talk about tomorrow?” Orson suggested as they all nearly had finished their plates. He squeegeed some grease out of his goatee with his hand. The other bounty hunters looked towards Samantha.

Samantha swallowed her bite and wiped her fingers on her shirt. “We get up, pack up, and head out. The four of us’re gonna have to take turns carrying Petite’s extra stuff, because we don’t want her opening her wounds over and over. We ain’t got time to keep re-dressing them.”

“She doesn’t have that much stuff, Samantha,” Darby replied, flicking his long ponytail behind his shoulder. “Just a duffle bag.”

“That’s not the point,” she spat. Darby shrugged. It seemed no one was going to be able to say anything right. Samantha pointed at Kurt. “You get to be Petite’s personal body guard, now that she’s _totally_ useless.”

“I what?! Babe, that seems unnecessarily cruel –“ Kurt scoffed. Samantha interrupted him.

“You and your idiocy nearly cost us the whole damn bounty, so now, you gotta take the responsibility.” She stood and stared him down. “We _know_ you value your own hide over anyone else’s, so if she dies, you better believe we’ll make sure to kill you, too.” Samantha stormed off to the shack and slammed the door.

Quiet settled back over the camp. Opal tossed her empty plate into the dirt and stood. “I’m going to turn in,” she declared, and retreated back to Kurt’s tent without waiting for any additional response. She crawled through the flaps clumsily and shimmied herself into her sleeping bag. Her wrist was throbbing. She lifted her left arm to cover her eyes. _Maybe when I wake up, this will all just have been a dream._  

Her breathing hitched in response. Hoping it was all a dream was a dream in itself, and she knew it. She was far from home, wounded, and alone. She didn’t bother holding it in, then, and just cried herself to sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still here, still writing! This fic is actually...complete! I have just been taking my time with updating it as life suddenly got very busy.
> 
> If you're still here and still reading...THANK YOU!

Opal woke up, her face puffy and warm, and all her joints feeling stiff. The past handful of nights sleeping on the ground with hardly any cushioning was compounding into her injuries and making her feel far older than her age.

Her corrected age, that was. She had a habit of losing the extra couple of centuries.

She inhaled deeply through her nostrils, opening her eyes and allowing the pitiful morning twilight to inform her of her immediate surroundings. She was surprised to find Joe Boy nestled near her head, snoozing contentedly.

 _“Don’t be that surprised, babe,”_ MacCready’s voice cooed through her mind, _“he’s keeping watch over you just as much as keeping you company._ ”

Opal drew herself up slowly, feeling joints in the back of her neck pop as she did so. Even that small amount of movement was enough to cause the dog to perk up, alert, but yawning. She nodded towards the mutt. “Just sitting up. No need for a panic.”

Joe Boy yawned again, standing and arching his back in a stretch humans could only dream of. He snuffed, then nuzzled himself an opening through the tent flaps and trotted out. Opal swiped some stray hairs out of her face before adjusting her sweater and pulling the sleeping bag open and following suit.

Kurt sat next to the fire pit, coaxing some tinder to flame to boil water for coffee. Joe Boy circled once and settled onto the ground next to his owner’s feet. Kurt reached down idly and rubbed the dog’s head behind his ears.

“Delegated bodyguard duty to the dog, did you?” she teased groggily, rubbing her eyes with the back of her left hand and sitting opposite Kurt.

“Nope,” was his odd and short reply. He sat up and pointed towards her wrist. “Still hurts?”

“It’s fine,” she lied. Every joint in and around her hand and wrist ached with every movement, and thought of movement, she made. The swelling had subsided substantially following Darby’s re-binding of her injury, but the pain remained.

“Whatever you say, Sparky.” Kurt carefully measured out a few spoonfuls of coffee grounds into the percolator pot and set it over the makeshift stove. “Don’t get to comfortable over there. We move out, today, and do we ever have a lot of ground to cover.”

“Mm. Better hope we don’t meet any other bounty hunters, raiders, or hostile trappers, then, huh?”

“For a beat up bitch, you’re still pretty mouthy.”

Opal shrugged, or what passed for one in her condition. “It’s my last line of defense, thanks to you.”

“And also thanks to me, you won’t soon be my problem, anymore.” Kurt rose and dusted his hands on his pants, causing a smear of coffee grounds to smudge into the denim. “We should only be a couple days’ hard travel to Nas, then we pass you off, collect our caps, and go back to our own lives.”

“You sound confident,” she replied, stretching her legs out in front of her. The small fire warmed the bottoms of her feet and was not altogether unpleasant.

“I know my work.”

“I suppose you do.”

The two sat quietly, listening to the hiss of the water heating within the coffee pot and the crackle and snap of the fire burning beneath it, for a few moments. Opal became lost in her own thoughts. If they truly were only a couple of days from Nas, she had nearly run out of time to find some way out of her situation and get back home. On top of that, escape seemed fatal while she had still been completely able bodied, but with a broken wrist and stiff shoulder?

_Don’t think like that. You can figure out how to get yourself home in your condition afterwards. You knew you weren’t going to be able to just fight your way out, before, and now it’s forced onto you to use your brains._

_What would MacCready do?_

“Sparky, wake up! Do you want some coffee or not?” Kurt was barking at her from across the fire.

“I – yeah, please,” Opal stammered in response.

“Oh, sorry to hear that. Only made enough for the rest of us,” he replied, a nasty grin on his face. Kurt gingerly slid the coffee pot off the fire and poured himself a cup before placing the coffee pot in the dirt next to his feet. The aroma was torturously intoxicating. Opal felt her face burn hotly as she fell for his childish prank.   She kicked the dirt in front of her and tried not to show how annoyed she was.

_These people are not your friends. You owe them nothing though your life is valuable to them._

Suddenly, it all became clear. She didn’t have to do a thing to help them, but they were determined to cash in on her existence.

She could certainly do things to make it more difficult for them.

It was a bratty, immature thought, and she loved it.

Opal stood up and made to walk past the fire and Kurt, when she kicked over the coffee pot, causing it to spill and for Kurt to recoil as quickly as he could. He still ended up with some of the scalding liquid splashing onto the top of his right boot. “Oh, so sorry!” she apologized innocently. “I should have watched where I was going.”

Kurt whipped out his hand and grabbed Opal just below her right elbow. His grip made her flinch slightly but she refused to respond, otherwise. “You better watch yourself, Sparky. You’ve got a lot of other bones to end up broken.”

She leaned towards him, holding her face close to his own. “Unless you want to have to carry me all the rest of the way, that’s not a smart threat to be making. Not to mention, the very real risk of my contracting an infection from any additional wounds I could sustain. What a waste of all your time if I die because you can’t help but be violent towards me.”

He narrowed his brow and opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the shrill voice of Samantha.

“What the hell is going on, here?”

Kurt released Opal’s arm and she straightened up. “He spilled the coffee but said if I didn’t lie and say it was me, he’d break my knee, next.”

Samantha’s eyes widened and she turned her fiery gaze onto Kurt. “Do we need to post a watch on you, too, you oaf?”

Kurt’s eyes shot daggers at Opal before he turned to plead with Samantha. “Nah, babe, not like that. I just got a little pissed off that…well, whatever.”

“Keep your damn hands to yourself, you hear me?” Samantha scolded, pointing at his face. “You’re worse than a child, I swear.” She turned to walk off, then called over her shoulder, “and make another pot of coffee.”

Opal watched as Kurt felt his jacket pockets for his cigarettes, retrieved them, and lit one without muttering another word. She considered adding some witty quip, but decided that Kurt wasn’t worth it. She’d be stuck next to him on the road, as it was.

Within two hours, the camp had cooked, eaten, and cleaned up a small breakfast, packed up all their things, and wandered through the trees back to the main road. Orson and his gauss rifle took point, Samantha and Joe Boy following, with Kurt and Opal in front of Darby, in the rear. The day had dawned sunny and clear, but as they walked, the sky became overcast. The wind began to pick up, threatening rain. Opal hunched and cradled her wrapped arm with the other into her chest. Soon enough, the sky opened up. Samantha pulled her scarf to cover her face just a little more, but none of the others behaved as if there had been any change to the weather.

 _Guess we’re ploughing through the weather, then._ Opal shivered, watching a drop of water jump from the tips of some of her loose hair. She couldn’t help but think of a luscious, hot cup of coffee, as the rain began to dampen her clothing and chill her skin.

The temperature began to drop quickly and significantly. Their breath became thin clouds of vapour, dissipating as soon as they came to life. Opal felt soaked and completely chilled. She grit her teeth as they continued to plod along through the miserable weather.

A fog began to form as the temperature of the air dropped quicker than that of the ground. Visibility steadily became worse, and eventually, Opal looked up ahead of her to see that it was impossible to see anything beyond twenty feet or so beyond their position. She glanced down at Joe Boy to see the dog completely unconcerned and trotting along, even if he did look the droopiest out of all of them, his wet fur sticking to his frame and making him appear quite abnormal.

She wondered that the sound of the rain and the increased humidity affected the dog’s senses. The situation made her feel nervous. _Mac trained me well._

Opal swallowed and flicked her gaze towards Kurt to see the man puffing along on a cigarette, plodding forwards, as if they weren’t in fact easy targets for anyone planning an ambush in the pouring rain.

 _Fuck them, then. Let them worry about an ambush._ She frowned to herself, feeling little comfort from her final thought.

The weather continued for the majority of the morning. It didn’t worsen, but didn’t show any signs of letting up, either. Samantha reached into her bag and passed around some jerky. “No time to stop, we’ll eat and walk.”

“Yes ma’am,” Kurt drawled. He plucked two pieces and held one out towards Opal. She swiped some wet hair off her face once more and accepted the jerky.

“Trouble in paradise?” she asked, unable to help herself. She took the tiniest bite of the jerky, its colour and texture unfamiliar to her. She wondered that it were something like radscorpion…or worse, radroach.

Kurt smirked that obnoxious cocky smile that made her blood boil. “This is the part where _I_ get to say, ‘none of your business.’”

 _Can’t say I didn’t deserve that._ “So, yes, then,” Opal pressed, anyways.

“He said it was none of your damn business, you stupid bitch,” the reply from Samantha. Her eyes burned from beneath her head scarf. “Eat your jerky and shut the fuck up.”

Opal took another small bite, trying desperately to ignore the fact she had no idea what she was eating. “Relationships aren’t easy,” she continued sagely, “but it’s really how you navigate the tough times that can make or break you.” She swallowed the jerky and took another timid bite. “My first real fight with MacCready was over the fact he didn’t like that I became the overboss of three gangs of raiders, and I wanted to at least give the job a try before walking away from it. We screamed at each other for three days.”

“No one asked,” called Darby from behind. Opal ignored him.

“He walked out, if you can believe that. He said he needed some space but I was sure it was the end. Cried my eyes out.”

“So write it in your diary, and _shut up_!” Samantha spat.

“ _You_ were a raider overboss?” Kurt remarked instead, shoving the last piece of his jerky into his mouth and chewing noisily. “Wish I had a picture of that.”

Opal drew up to her full height. “It shouldn’t be that hard to believe. It’s not like being one of the founding heads of The Mayors is all that much different. They want food, beer, money, and glory. It’s my job to make sure they don’t kill each other in the process.”

“Not anymore,” Samantha replied, the expression on her face indicating the conversation was over.

The rain stopped in the early afternoon but the fog remained. The thick cloud cover overhead meant the chances of enough sunny breaks to effectively burn off the fog were quite low. They’d have to keep walking through the low visibility for the rest of the day. At some point, the pavement of the road had all but disappeared, forcing the group to slip, slide, and squelch over inconsistent gravelly patches and thick mud.

“What the hell happened to the road?” cursed Darby as he picked himself up from having lost his balance on some slick rocks to land on his knees in the mud.

“Hey genius,” Kurt called up towards Orson, “did you take a wrong turn? Where are we going?”

“I didn’t take a wrong turn. I didn’t take _any_ turn. The road just looks like it was dug out, for some reason,” Orson replied, not bothering to even turn his head.

Opal noticed a rusted out bulldozer on the side of the road. Centuries of growth had enveloped the majority of its lower half, but there was no mistaking what it was. The road had been under construction when the bombs had hit, which was why it had remained unpaved.

“Boo!” Kurt barked into her ear, causing her to jump. He cackled. “Afraid of dead machines, Sparky? Don’t you worry, they can’t hurt you. Not like anyone around these days knows what they do or how they start.”

 _As if I didn’t know that_. Opal merely nodded and said nothing else.

“Can we just keep moving? The longer we’re tooling around in the open, the more nervous I get. You sure you followed The Beam’s directions right?” Darby’s turn to call to Orson.

“Yes, I have, not like they were all that detailed or complicated, anyways. ‘Follow the highway. There will be signs to Nas.’ So unless you got _better_ directions…” Orson didn’t finish his sentence.

“Everyone, just shut up. I’m getting a headache from all the yammering,” Samantha waved them all down.

They walked on and on. The cold had settled into Opal’s bones and she shivered constantly as they walked, unable to get warm. Her broken wrist throbbed almost as if the injury was new. Her fingers were freezing, stiff, and despite being numb from cold, they ached, painfully. She wiped her face with the back of her left hand, the wool from her sweater scratching over her nose.

“Here, Sparky.” Kurt dropped his ancient leather coat over her shoulders. She nearly buckled under its weight. “Can’t have ya catching a fever or somethin’.”

Opal bristled. “I don’t want it,” she replied curtly, making to shake it off.

Kurt reached over and stopped the jacket from falling off. “I don’t care, I’m makin’ ya take it. We ain’t stoppin’ for another few hours, at least.”

Opal exhaled slowly through her nostrils. There was no arguing with the bounty hunter, and she hated to admit to herself that the residual body heat within the jacket felt at least marginally comforting. “Fine.”

“No more talkin’,” Orson hissed from the front of the group. “I have a feeling this area is lousy with yao guai, or worse, and I’ll be damned to get fucked by a deathclaw out in the fog.”

As if on cue, a distant grumbling from an indeterminate creature could be heard through the trees. A lump formed in Opal’s throat. She hadn’t felt so pathetically defenseless since she first crawled her way out of the vault, all those years ago. The fingers on her right hand twitched. None of the bounty hunters said a thing. Joe Boy paused briefly, his ears perked up towards the sound. Eventually he seemed to conclude same as the bounty hunters there was nothing to be concerned about. The group picked up their pace while trying to move as quietly as possible.

The day came to a blissfully uneventful end. Despite the awful weather, they had covered quite a bit of ground without any confrontation from hostiles. As twilight began to tint the cloud cover, Samantha motioned for the group to gather on the side of the road.

“Take Joe Boy and scout out a campsite,” she nodded at Kurt.

“You bet, babe,” he replied, then knocked Opal gently in the arm. “Let’s go.”

Opal made to follow when Samantha stepped between them. “What are you doing?”

“Aren’t I stuck with babysitting her until we get there? Pretty sure that’s what you said last night,” Kurt rolled his eyes.

“She don’t need to go with you into the woods, the rest of us can handle her. Besides, last time you took her off into the trees is why she’s all messed up, now.”

Joe Boy whined, anxious to bound off on a task. Kurt didn’t take the bait and merely shrugged. “Come on, Joe Boy, let’s go find us a camp.”

Joe Boy barked and tore into the woods, Kurt following behind. Orson lit up a cigarette, while Darby stretched his arms and neck, causing several joints to pop and crackle. Samantha beckoned for Orson’s lighter and lit a cigarette of her own. Opal merely stood, staring up the road.

“Hey,” Samantha called to her after a moment or two. Opal turned.

“What?”

Smoke blew out of Samantha’s nostrils in twin streams, joining as they rose past her face and into the air above her head. Her expression was unreadable. “I know there’s something not right about him, about you.”

Opal blinked. “Excuse me?”

“He thinks you’re interesting, but he doesn’t now why. Damn galoot probably would never be able to figure it out in a million years,” she muttered, taking another drag on her cigarette. She tapped her foot, then blew the smoke out her mouth.

“If you’re suggesting something is going on between us, you’re dead wrong. I’m married,” Opal quipped defensively.

“Cheating doesn’t always mean fucking, Petite. I can assure you of that.”

Opal’s face burned hotly at the implication. “I’m not a cheater. I’d never, ever do that to MacCready.”

“Good for you. Do you think he feels the same?”

“He has no reason to think I’d cheat on him.”

“No, idiot,” Samantha tapped some ashes to the ground, “do you honestly think he wouldn’t cheat on you?”

Opal quivered. “He’s waiting for me to come home.”

“Now that’s a real shame, but beside the point. Or, not really. He’d have plenty of time to have some fun and never get caught, wouldn’t he?” There was a devilish flicker in Samantha’s eyes as she posed her question.

“He wouldn’t do that. He’s cocky, selfish, and sarcastic, but he’s _loyal_. He’d never jeopardize what we have.”

“Not while you’re around, at least.”

“Fuck off,” Opal growled. Her right hand twitched as if it meant to ball itself into a fist, but was blocked by the assembly on her wrist. Her cheeks continued to burn, embarrassed she’d let the bounty hunter get to her.

Kurt re-appeared, looking satisfied with himself. “Let’s go, got a great spot just up ahead. Already started a fire an’ everything.” He winked at Samantha. “See? I do good, sometimes.”

Orson and Darby made towards where Kurt had exit the trees. Opal clumsily pulled the jacket off her shoulders and shoved it into Kurt’s chest. “I don’t want this, anymore,” she declared, stepping past him and into the trees after the other bounty hunters. Within moments, she stood inside an elaborate set up that she could hardly believe. Several ancient tarps had been strung up within the trees to create a large, covered area that housed some dressers, a bookshelf, a table and chairs, and two military-style bunk beds. Outside featured the large fire pit, several meat curing racks, and a curio cabinet full of dried, wild herbs, cooking utensils, and even some cooking oil and liquors.

“Geez,” Opal breathed, taking it all in.

“Are we sure the owners of this spot ain’t gonna turn up?” Darby asked, poking around the empty meat racks.

“Looks dusty as hell, and pretty much empty. No clothing, weapons, food, nothin’,” Orson sniffed, his hands on his hips as he observed the interior of the tented area. “There ain’t enough beds for all of us, though.”

“I’m sure a couple of us won’t mind _sharing_ ,” Kurt drawled, having arrived into the campsite with Samantha. He reached over and gave her backside a squeeze.

“Thin ice,” she added, smirking.

Opal watched the exchange with a confused look on her face. Nothing about anyone, or anything, in her situation, made any sense. She glanced over at the dog, fast asleep next to the fire. _Now there’s the right idea._ She located a nearby, handmade stool that was not at all aesthetically pleasing, lifted it with her left hand, and put it next to the fire. Its warmth was extremely welcome. Slowly but surely, the chill began to be chased out of her skin and bones. Darby eventually approached the fire with some packages wrapped in bloody rags, which he revealed to be meat from the radstag Kurt had dragged into their camp the day before.

Opal had never been a fan of radstag, but the smell of the meat searing over the fire, after a damp and chilly day, was quite appetizing.

The meal had concluded to an exchange of stories between the bounty hunters. Orson dug up some choice pieces of his past, from before he started running with Samantha and Darby, that had the camp clutching their sides and howling with laughter. Opal smiled and nodded politely, though deep down she knew they would never care whether or not she was even paying attention. She hoped at least one of them would reveal something she could potentially use to start causing small stress tears between them, but the crew seemed to be blowing off steam and swapping tales. The other thing they were swapping was a large bottle of vodka, procured from the herb cabinet.

Kurt came up behind her from having excused himself to the call of nature and nudged her with the side of a glass bottle. A genuine Gwinnett Pale Ale. “Look at that, Sparky! They had dug out their own earthen cellar for the stuff they wanted to keep kinda cold and they didn’t take them along.”

Opal blinked at the beer but didn’t move to take it.

Kurt nudged her, again. “I know the beer’s your favourite. You’re practically drooling. Here,” he smiled, twisting the cap off for her and holding the bottle out to her for a third time.

Opal took the beer in her left hand, hesitated, and decided to take a sip. The radiation burn mixed with the hoppy top note before mellowing out into the crisp, clean finish she knew all too well. She nodded before taking a second sip.

“Gee, not even gonna try a ‘thank you,’ huh?” He strode across the gathering to tuck himself back next to Samantha.

She held her third mouthful in the back of the throat before swallowing it down. “Is that a fucking joke?” Opal asked coolly.

“I gave you your favourite drink on purpose and all you could do was nod? No, I weren’t jokin’. That’s just rude,” he replied, appearing serious.

“What, exactly, do I have to thank you for, Kurt Bleishtift? My life has become considerably worse since the day I met you, asshole, and that’s saying something, because _I was there the bombs dropped_.” She paused for emphasis, enjoying the shocked, dumbfounded expressions staring back at her, and stood. “That’s right, I woke up in this shithole of a world two hundred years after the fact, thanks to Vault Tec and their sadistic experiment of shoving me and all the other residents of 111 into freezers that they later just _forgot_ about. But, I survived. I met a partner who helped me grow, and we got by. We have kids.” Opal looked down and swirled the beer in her bottle, and was shocked to see she had already downed half of it.   She turned her gaze back up and across the fire to lock with Kurt. “Now, I’m days from my family and my home, I’m roughed up and defenseless, and about to be sold for my life for _your_ fucking profit. You want thanks? Thank you, motherfucker, for completely ruining my life.”

The others exchanged glances, but otherwise did not reply. Their lack of response merely made Opal feel worse. She sighed and sat herself back down. “I get it,” she mumbled. “I don’t pretend to be perfect, and I certainly won’t suggest Mac is, either. We were mercs, I know what it’s like. You have a target and nothing else. You don’t bother yourself with thoughts of it being a life, a person. I just…” She sighed, again. “I get it.”

The bounty hunters exchanged looks once again. Orson was the first to burst into laughter, and all the others followed suit.

“Okay, who had…six? Six days,” snorted Kurt.

Samantha reached into her coat and produced a folded piece of paper from an unknown pocket. She squinted at it. “No one. Orson had eight, though Darby had five – tough luck on that one, Dar,” she cooed, tilting her head in sympathy.

“I was still closer than eight,” he congratulated himself in response, taking a swig out of the vodka bottle.

“Rules is rules, Darby, my good man! It’s what separates us from the animals, you know?” Orson chuckled, tossing his cigarette butt into the fire and holding his hands out towards Samantha. She placed a small pouch of caps into his eager palms, crumpled the paper, and tossed it, too, into the fire.

Opal couldn’t restrain herself. “What were you betting on, exactly?”

“The number of days until you’d crack, Petite,” Samantha replied, yanking the vodka bottle out of Darby’s hand and helping herself to a mouthful.

“A little tradition among bounty hunters,” added Darby.

“Or just us,” Orson finished.

“For what it’s worth, Sparky, Sam there had the least faith in you by bettin’ four days, and I’ll have you know I gave you a nice, rounded ten,” Kurt grinned. His teeth glistened in the firelight.

“You’re all a bunch of fucking assholes,” Opal grumbled. She stood, took the few steps towards Kurt, and snatched the nearly full beer out of his hands. Her words and actions merely caused the bounty hunters to cackle in laughter once more. She returned to her stool and finished her first beer, fighting back tears.

Orson had stood to light a cigarette and leer lecherously at her. “Listen, honey, if you need to take any of that rage out on someone in a _hate-fuck_ , I don’t mind volunteering.” He was leaning close enough that she could smell the noxious mix of tobacco and vodka on his breath, and the undertone of grilled radstag still stuck in his teeth.

“That ship don’t sail, Orson, didn’t ya hear her bleat all about her loyalty to her husband back there?” teased Samantha, taking another sip of vodka and swaying slightly on her seat.

“Well,” Orson began, keeping his gaze trained on Opal, “maybe she just didn’t think anyone’d be interested in a good, old fashioned, hate fuck, and was too polite to ask.”

“Y’all got a real twisted idea of manners, that’s for sure,” Opal responded, taking a swig out of her pilfered beer. “And, _no thank you._ ”

“You just let me know if you change yer mind,” he winked, retreating to his seat. “I think I should count up my winnings, just to make sure it’s all there.”

 _I’ll never understand these people._ Opal stared into the base of the fire, watching the flames sway and dance. She wrestled with reconciling the tipsy, propositioning man in front of her with the memory of that same individual helping her dress and patching up her wounds the day before, before insisting she take in calories, and divulging some information about the others.

_There’s nothing to reconcile. He’s just doing a job, like the rest of them. There was never any humanity in what he did, merely a task._

“Fucking hell,” she muttered under her breath. The group had moved on in the conversation to reminiscing on past bets on bounties come and gone. Opal brooded, fidgeting with her beer. _They’ve been one step ahead of me, or more, the whole time. I’ll never get a leg up on them. I’ll be lucky to even catch up._

 _“Don’t doubt yourself like that, babe,”_ MacCready’s voice cooed through her mind in a soothing tone. She could almost feel him wrapping his arms around her shoulders. _“It’s what they want, for you to feel powerless. Just keep watching, and waiting. I know patience isn’t your strong suit, but it’s really important that you try, right now.”_

She smirked to herself, certain she’d heard MacCready use that line on at least one of the children, before. She took some comfort in the idea she wasn’t just fabricating some mental version of him for her own sanity. Opal let her mind wander, reminiscing on her and MacCready’s travels and some of the stickier situations they pulled through.

 _“See? You’ve been through a lot, and learned a lot, too. Just be patient_ ,” Mac’s voice repeated in her mind.

She plunked the empty beer bottle onto the ground by her feet and rose, stretching delicately. She felt sufficiently warm and comfortable, and as a result, sleepy. Opal turned to shuffle off and claim half a bunk for herself.

“Where ya going, Sparky?” Kurt called after her. Joe Boy was suddenly at her heels and Kurt was close behind. Opal stopped and turned to face the large man, shadowed with his back to the fire.

“Going to bed. Alone,” she added, directing that past Kurt and at Orson. The latter winked. “Ugh.”

“Yeah, that’s just gonna encourage him. Well, let’s go, then.”

Opal rolled her eyes, though she should have expected to have an escort to her sleeping bag. Samantha and Darby had broken out into some call-and-answer saloon ditty and seemed oblivious to the others. She made to climb onto the nearest bottom bunk when Kurt physically blocked her from doing so.

“What?” she asked, exasperated.

“Top bunk,” he chirped, pulling her back and patting the bed he referred to. “Up you go, I’ll spot you.”

Opal managed not to grumble and carefully ascended the short ladder upwards. As she bent over the very top, Kurt gave a hearty shove on her rump to push her all the way on to the stale, ancient mattress. “Watch it,” she snapped.

Kurt laughed. “Watch what?” He pushed down the latter, which fell to the dirt floor with an underwhelming thump.

“What the fuck?! How am I supposed to get down?”

“In the morning, when I put the ladder back up, duh.” He shrugged casually, then crossed his arms on her bed. “You want me to tuck you in?”

“Asshole,” she spat in response. “You really think I’d try and take off? Where would I go?”

He tilted his head. “Home, of course. They always make a break for home, even if they don’t know the way. Trust me, I’ve seen it all.”

She shook her head, untying her boots and placing them on the corner of the bunk. Opal wiggled her way into the sleeping bag, doing her best not to show her discomfort with being on the top bunk, in general. “I’m tired.”

“That’s never stopped someone before, either,” Kurt smirked, giving her a little tap on the nose. The gesture did nothing but cause Opal to seethe.

“Can’t you just leave me alone?”

“No. It’s too much fun.”

She grumbled something incoherent. _I have to stop taking the bait. It’s half his entertainment, I’m sure._ Opal settled herself onto the pillow and closed her eyes. The mattress was as hard and unforgiving as anything, but there was some simple pleasure in being able to stretch out after a long day’s travelling.

Kurt drummed his fingers along the side bar of the bunk. “Know what? I think I’ll join ya.”

Opal opened her eyes and turned to face him, yet again. “Excuse me?”

Kurt was already shedding his jacket, dropping it unceremoniously to the floor next to the bottom bunk. He sat onto the bed and started pulling off his boots, as well. “I meant that I’m gonna turn in. They’re certainly havin’ an amazing time and you drank my beer.”

Opal wasn’t sure what she heard in his voice. The singing by the campfire had certainly become louder, and sloppier. “They’re close friends, who’re drunk. Seen this lots of times with the Mayors.”

“They ain’t _friends_ ,” Kurt corrected her. “There are no friends in this business.”

“Oh? That’s not the impression I got. Orson said they’ve travelled together as a group for years. That tends to build bonds.”

“Built bonds, all right,” he muttered. Opal had no idea what he was referring to and just felt confused. She decided it wasn’t worth her while to care. She laid on her back, staring straight up to the tarps collected overhead. There was something comfortable and cozy about a “roof” over her head, rather than another night under the stained canvas of Kurt’s tent. Before she could catch herself, she let out a contented sigh and closed her eyes to prepare for sleep.

She woke some hours later, wondering what could have roused her. It was so still, the tarps above hardly rustled in a breeze. Opal yawned, and rolled over to peer into the muted, starlit darkness. The other two bunk beds were occupied, and Opal could only assume that Samantha had crawled in with Kurt. There was no movement, and the only sounds were deep breathing and an occasional fart. She scrunched her nose and turned her gaze towards the extinguished campfire.

She froze, her heart rate escalating immediately, at the sight of a yao guai sniffing around the empty alcohol bottles and nuzzling for food scraps.

 _Maybe it won’t notice us in here. If it’s looking for food, it might just leave us alone._ Opal breathed through her nostrils as slowly as she possibly could manage. Luck was not on her side, as one of the men on the other side released a cacophony of flatulence she almost felt as well as heard. Vodka clearly made someone gassy. Her eyes darted between the source of the sound, and the yao guai, which had also paused to look into the tent.

When it began to approach in towards them, Opal feared for the worst. Joe Boy finally stirred from where he was curled up on the ground next to Kurt and Samantha’s bunk, his ears standing straight up. He let out a low growl. She leaned over the edge of her bunk as far as she could balance and saw Kurt, still fast asleep, directly below her. “Wake up!” she called, firmly. “Wake up, now! Yao guai!”

“Dafuggisyoutalkinbout,” he murmured groggily.

The yao guai let out a roar. All the rest of the sleeping adults were jerked awake. Joe Boy had his hackles up and responded with a snarl, bearing his teeth. The man on the bottom bunk across the room, still drunk, made to roll over to see what was happening, but instead slid off the edge of the bed to sprawl onto the ground. It was Orson.

“Whaa…shit, what the hell,” he grumbled, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

“ _Yao guai_!” Opal repeated, nearly shrieking in her helpless panic. She was theoretically fine on the top bunk, until such time the yao guai decided to shake her off of it.

The mutated bear was on Orson immediately. Joe Boy sprung from his position to sink his teeth into one of the yao guai’s limbs, but it hardly was cause for the beast to flinch. Orson was screaming. It was dark, but Opal could see the blood spilling out from beneath his body to pool under the yao guai’s paws. It violently ravaged the bounty hunter, its teeth ripping his neck and chest into shreds.

“Holy fuck!” cried Darby, pulling his legs up into himself, barely believing the scene below him. Opal saw his barbed bat propped up next to the dresser and imagined he was feeling about as powerless as she.

“Hello, down there!” she called beneath her bunk, once more. “Could really use some guns as backup!”

The yao guai’s ears flicked at the sound of her voice, but it continued to busy itself with Orson’s guts and bones. Opal’s stomach turned at the sight of it all and forced herself to look away.

“I’m workin’ on it,” Kurt replied through clenched teeth. Suddenly, the snap and crackle of his rifle shooting a round into the yao guai’s skull filled the enclosure. Spent lead and gunpowder filled Opal’s nostrils. The slug thudded thickly into the creature’s head, causing it to cry out and release a mouthful of Orson. Opal had never seen anything quite like that and feared she would be sick.

It turned its head towards Kurt, who squeezed off another shot, which landed in the beast’s shoulder. It growled and began to turn its body as though threatening to come for Kurt, next. Opal couldn’t tell what Samantha was doing without leaning over to look down, and she didn’t care enough to find out to do so.

“Come on, you ugly bastard. Come on, now,” Kurt breathed.

The yao guai opened its mouth to release another roar, just to take a rifle slug into the top of its mouth and throat. It ripped through the cartilage and flesh, causing it to haemorrhage and begin drowning in its own blood. The creature, not knowing it was dying, attempted to approach Kurt. Opal curled her legs up to her chest and clamped her eyes closed, unsure that the last shot had done the trick and worried that soon, she’d be joining Orson.

It began to make a disgusting sputtering sound, hacking and choking, spraying blood from its mouth, before it fell like so much dead weight, its final breath gurgling through its maw. It twitched all over its body for several minutes.

“Oh shit, oh Orson, no,” Samantha moaned, finally coming to life. She came out from under Opal’s bunk to take in the gruesome scene, then suddenly leaned behind the other bunk beds to vomit onto the floor. When she finished, panting, she waved weakly at Darby. “Wrap him up in his sleeping bag, and…we’ll decide what to do with him, later. Then sit your ass out by the fire and post a damn watch.”

Darby merely nodded. He pulled a shirt on over his tank top and stepped down the short latter to the ground. Samantha turned to give Kurt an instruction, but he was already laboriously dragging the yao guai carcass out of the enclosure and towards the trees. Opal laid herself back down, refusing to look again at the mess that Orson had become, concentrating on her breathing.

She’d seen the mangled remains of poor bastards waylaid by deathclaws, ghouls, even feral mongrels dozens and dozens of times, but something about the fact this one made a point to just start _eating_ its victim indicated that it was ill beyond its mutation. It made her uneasy. “God,” she muttered to herself, “what an awful way to go.”

“You said it,” Kurt’s voice was next to her, causing her to startle. How could a man that large move so quietly? “We weren’t friends or anything, but I mean, I didn’t want the guy dead.”

“It’ll be the last time he forgets to post a watch,” Opal sighed.

Kurt laughed in response. “Damn, you’re funny, when you try.” 

Opal rolled her eyes, and rolled over.

“Ah, there she goes.” She heard Kurt lumber onto the bottom bunk, the frame squeaking under his weight.


End file.
